|
702df23
|
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
|
|
love
rural-life
john-watson
countryside
vile
sherlock-holmes
experience
smiling
beautiful
london
sin
|
Arthur Conan Doyle |
|
b851df2
|
Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.
|
|
stars
countryside
|
Jeannette Walls |
|
96cbd3e
|
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
|
|
migraine
countryside
suburbs
city
|
Neil Gaiman |
|
93e7f76
|
From then on, it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photgenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner - providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra.
|
|
countryside
foxglove-summer
peter-grant
|
Ben Aaronovitch |
|
0e50e5c
|
It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in , for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since , but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.
|
|
jane-austen
literature
silence
women
1960s
earl-of-bessborough
gassing
hampshire
hiroshima
mansions
myxomatosis
napoleonic-wars
new-forest
persuasion-novel
richard-adams
sussex
theatre-of-ancient-greece
townships
war-memorials
watership-down
wind-in-the-willows
napoleon
countryside
meadow
massacre
rabbits
cruelty
world-war-ii
quiet
england
europe
literary-criticism
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
4395d5f
|
"...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")"
|
|
rural-life
rural
countryside
|
Edith Wharton |
|
2021248
|
Gone. We were out in the country and everything slowed down into rolling hills covered with snow. There were trees, but no leaves, and I could not remember seeing anything so white and clean. Winter in the city was gray and the snow was dirty, but out here it was so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to turn away.
|
|
winter
train-ride
countryside
trains
snow
|
Gary Paulsen |
|
bb2d62d
|
Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.
|
|
death
life
love
e-m-forster
howards-end
countryside
parting
|
E.M. Forster |