Hedgerows Quotes

• An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

  Bill Bryson

  Iowa, Space, Looks

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• A clock struck out the hour of twelve, and the bird in the hedgerow was still singing as we marched out to the roadway, and followed our merry pipers home to town.

  Patrick MacGill

  Home, Sight, Bird

  MacGill, Patrick (2017). “The Amateur Army”, p.36, Read Books Ltd

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• Fairy folk a-listening Hear the seed sprout in the spring, And for music to their dance Hear the hedgerows wake from trance, Sap that trembles into buds Sending little rhythmic floods Of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears Has birth as sound to finer sense And lighter-clad intelligence.

  George Eliot

  Spring, Listening, Sound

  George Eliot (2006). “Daniel Deronda: Easyread Edition”, p.346, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .

  T. S. Eliot

  Attachment, Self, Three

  T.S. Eliot (2009). “Collected Poems 1909-1962”, p.180, Faber & Faber

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• There's more than one way between your world and ours. There's the changeling road, and there's the Ravishing, and there's those that Stumble through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring or a tornado or a wardrobe full of winter coats.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Winter, Mushrooms, World

  Catherynne M. Valente (2014). “The Fairyland Series”, p.214, Macmillan

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• There is no reason why you should be bored when you can be otherwise. But if you find yourself sitting in the hedgerow with nothing but weeds, there is no reason for shutting your eyes and seeing nothing, instead of finding what beauty you may in the weeds. To put it cynically, life is too short to waste it in drawing blanks. Therefore, it is up to you to find as many pictures to put on your blank pages as possible.

  Emily Post

  Weed, Life Is Too Short, Eye

  Emily Post (2007). “Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home”, p.54, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, Men, Shrubs

  David R. Foster, Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape”, p.67, Harvard University Press

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• Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

  Mark Hoppus

  Mom, Beach, Dad

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• A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

  P. D. James

  Men, Cities, Violence

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• I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Song, Children, Passion

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1861). “Hyperion, a romance. Kavanagh, a tale”, p.79

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• Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

  George Eliot

  Running, Time, Travel

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.1155, ShandonPress

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• Dishonor is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows; it can only poison if it be plucked.

  Ouida

  Poison, Beard, Dishonor

  Ouida (1870). “Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies”, p.444

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• Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.

  Peter Heller

  Dog, Hurt, Pain

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• He put his foot on one pedal, scooted a few yards and swung his other leg over the saddle. He soared left into the vertiginously sloping hillside road and sped, without touching his brakes ... The hedgerows and sky blurred; he imagined himself in a velodrome as the wind whipped his hair clean...

  J. K. Rowling

  Healing, Hair, Wind

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• Dose it ever amaze and delight you that of all the places in the world - cold grassy nests under hedgerows, warm patches of sun on a carpet - the cat chooses to sit on your lap?

  Nevada Barr

  Inspirational, Cat, Lap

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