Country Life Quotes

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
― John Steinbeck

“How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”
― Sarah Reijonen, Country Girl: Letting Love & Wanderlust Take the Reins

“What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")”
― Edith Wharton, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“And if the world went to hell in a handbasket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it.”
― Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

“This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.”
― Kimber Silver, Broken Rhodes

“I prefer the ground over the pedestal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“In any case, I see no reason why a good-tempered, steady-going cat should not be included in a country classroom. It adds a pleasantly domestic touch to our working conditions.”
― Miss Read, Village Diary

“Mountain folk have their own code. And they hold each other to it, straightforward like; No beatin’ around the bush.”
― C.A. Tedeschi, Fen and the Every Path

“People in the country wave because it’s important to them that they wave. The response doesn’t alter what they feel they should do. Apart from that, they generally don’t overthink things. They have too much to do.”
― Donna Goddard, Purnima

“Everyone walks everywhere in country towns, especially the children. Although most are unaware of its impact, it automatically connects bodies to the land. All the temperature changes are keenly felt when little divides the body from its surroundings.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“In the country, there are unseen eyes and ears everywhere. They may not be many in number, but they are highly perceptive. That’s what happens when you live in a quiet environment. You notice everything.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“What was stolen by the city, nature restores.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“As the days continue to lengthen, and most signs of winter are gone, familiar songbirds return to the sugar bush, and the frogs in the lowlands begin to sing.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some.”
― Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy

“the old house,
in the lee of the hills,
surrounded by relics
of the old powder mill.

the ancient stones silent,
the water wheels still,
but yet there is life
in the ruins of the mill.

the birds and the sheep
find shelter to sleep
the fisherman fish
in the river so deep.

the flowers of the forest
carpet the glades.
and the frogs they are leaping
down in the lades.

laughter bygone
forever is still
yet the echoes still linger
here in the mill.

voices come whispering
from the century that was
and dash is just resting
under the moss.

on nights of bright moon
flooding over the hill
I sense the life breathing
here, in the mill.

and here in the house
time beats gently past
as it has done before
and will to the last.”
― Christine Marion Fraser, Green Are My Mountains

“The more distant you get from the soil, the more distant you get from life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“Her thoughts were drawn back to the reality of small-town country life. Their world is small; occasionally idyllic, but nearly always small.”
― Donna Goddard, Purnima

“You-ins. The even more hillbilly adaptation of “y’all.” I never used it. You know I always was a “y’all” girl.”
― Sarah Esterly, Stalker Sarah & Trophy Tommy's Crazy Country Summer: An Insane 90s Teen Romance, F**ked Up Woman's Survival Story, and Letter to a Long-Lost Friend

“Everyone across America had the same idea at the same time. Chickens became the toilet paper of the spring.”
― Melissa Gilbert, Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered

“I do hope I’m not butting in, Mrs. Carter,” said George Halliday, “but mother wants to know if you need a broody hen as one of ours has just started brooding.”
“Exactly what I do want,” said Mrs. Carter. “Shall I come and fetch her?”
“She’s in the back of my car,” said George. “She’s less than no use at home at the moment and upsetting all the other girls with her talk about a lay-down strike. If you really have some eggs for her it’ll give her something to think about.”
― Angela Thirkell, Never Too Late

“Familiar songbirds reappear, perched high above the stark white landscape in those final frigid days of February and March. Their long-awaited songs announce a return to sunny days, with nights still cold enough to freeze in that delicate balance of those elusive few weeks when the sap will run.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“On those crisp late winter days, when temperatures drop below freezing at nightfall, then rise once again in a sunny spring thaw you'll find them there. Three generations will be tapping, gathering, and boiling the sap, including some from the same faithful trees that towered over the property long before their ancestors arrived from northwestern Ireland.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“The powerful forces of nature, both kind and cruel, some nurturing, some destructive, live at the heart of any maple syrup operation.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“She walks the same paths where her father walked, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather before her. She passes by familiar trees, the towering silent witnesses to over two centuries of history. Many of these majestic woodland giants, like faithful old friends, proudly bear the telltale tap-marks, remnants of a multi-generational maple harvest.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“You are a city girl, what would you know about this kind of land?”
― Kenan Hudaverdi, Emotional Rhapsody

“My time living in Hausach was idyllic, actually." Thoughtfulness swept over her, and her smile became truer. "Idyllic and quaint. Certainly not always free of struggle, but it gave me a view of my country I would not have otherwise. Would that all of Austria--- indeed, all of the empire--- could be idyllic and quaint, and free of struggle. That is the goal we all work toward as leaders, is it not?”
― Sara Raasch, A Sword In Slumber

“In the city, people often feel lonely amongst so many people, but country towns, being more codependent, tend to be more connected.”
― Donna Goddard

“What's the point of your architecture or engineering degree, if you can't build a human habitat without destroying entire ecosystems of other living things! And you call yourself an engineer, an architect - a sparrow has more sense than a stupid earthling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat