Rural Landscapes Quotes

Norfolk would not be Norfolk without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.

I do mostly Southern landscapes. I do beautiful old barns that are falling down, and beautiful trees reflecting in the water. My lovely wife Dorothy and I travel quite a bit, so I take pictures of different things that inspire me to come home, when I come home here in North Carolina, into my art studio and paint these things.

The sound of water escaping from mill dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things.

I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don't work on it directly. Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers.

Wisdom delights in water; love delights in hills. Wisdom is stirring; love is quiet. Wisdom is merry; love grows old.

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.

I loved the [English] countryside. I went to John Bonham's grave.

We don't have to do what candidates do—talk about huge issues for 30 seconds in a field somewhere trying to make sure that cows do no urinate on our shoes.

The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.

The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.

You're never going to go. Why would you go? It's a disgusting place. It's always wet even when it's dry. There's nothing there. Farmers aren't really people, you know this. They're just necessary, we need somebody to kill cows.

Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn

Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry, about the country, the suburbs and the seaside. Then there comes love... and increasingly; the fear of death.

Westerns give people a chance to see wide-open spaces and life before technology took over.

OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.

My brother and I grew up in a setting in the woods very much like 'The Witch' in southern New Hampshire, and then we would drive up north to Maine to settings like 'The Lighthouse' for vacations.

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.

I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.

Trains are wonderful.... To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.

I go to Australia probably once every two years. It's wide-open spaces there, so I just rent a motorcycle and ride out to the middle of the continent. For hours, you don't see anybody.

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.