{"quotes":[{"text":"We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.","author":"G.M.W. Wemyss","tags":["country-life","countryside","sir-john-betjeman","time","village-life","writing"],"id":14328,"author_id":"G.M.W.+Wemyss"},{"text":"She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.","author":"Laurie Lee","tags":["cider-with-rosie","countryside","laurie-lee","mothers","women"],"id":25807,"author_id":"Laurie+Lee"},{"text":"The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.","author":"James Carlos Blake","tags":["countryside","seasons","winter"],"id":54024,"author_id":"James+Carlos+Blake"},{"text":"You know (to adopt the easy or conversational style) that you and I belong to a happy minority. We are the sons of the hunters and the wandering singers, and from our boyhood nothing ever gave us greater pleasure than to stand under lonely skies in forest clearings, or to find a beach looking westward at evening over unfrequented seas. But the great mass of men love companionship so much that nothing seems of any worth compared with it. Human communion is their meat and drink, and so they use the railways to make bigger and bigger hives for themselves.","author":"Hilaire Belloc","tags":["countryside","nature","people","railways","solitude","tourism"],"id":87791,"author_id":"Hilaire+Belloc"},{"text":"Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.","author":"Jon McGregor","tags":["city","countryside","home"],"id":92084,"author_id":"Jon+McGregor"},{"text":"My favourite road I've ever been on ain't paved.","author":"Viktor Tatarczuk","tags":["country","countrylife","countryside","farm","forest","gravel-road","road"],"id":96179,"author_id":"Viktor+Tatarczuk"},{"text":"Hurt can make you blind to the truth.","author":"Abby Clements","tags":["countryside","family","home","love","moving"],"id":128931,"author_id":"Abby+Clements"},{"text":"But sometimes even people who care about each other need some time apart.","author":"Abby Clements","tags":["countryside","family","home","love","moving"],"id":132373,"author_id":"Abby+Clements"},{"text":"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.","author":"Arthur Conan Doyle","tags":["alleys","beautiful","countryside","experience","john-watson","london","love","rural-life","sherlock-holmes","sin","smiling","vile"],"id":146113,"author_id":"Arthur+Conan+Doyle"},{"text":"Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things.","author":"Laurie Lee","tags":["beauty","beauty-in-nature","boyhood","childhood-memories","cider-with-rosie","countryside","landscape","laurie-lee","nature","pastoral"],"id":152308,"author_id":"Laurie+Lee"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}