Nick Swarbrick > Nick's Quotes

“O quam dulcis vita fuit dum sedabamus in quieti . . . inter liborum copias. : 'Oh how sweet life was when we sat quietly . . . midst all these books.”
― Alcuin of York

“Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be?”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“At the end of day, he looked out and saw that they were safe under ravens.”
― Alan Garner, Boneland

“I struggle impotently to express who I really am. Often I would confess these sins as I kneel and gabble my “Bless-me-Father-for-I-have-sinned …” but it is suffering too deep for speech, and true guilt almost too deep for conscious knowledge.”
― Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life

“To be alone there and in silence was like coming suddenly under the lee of a wall on a wild, windy day, so that one can breathe and collect oneself again.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till we have Faces: A Myth Retold

“Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“I think I may have missed the world, that the one I’ve seen is a decoy to get me off the scent.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“We all get crucified at some point, and we might as well be crucified for our own ideals as for someone else’s.”
― Maggie Ross, The Fire of Your Life

“Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Quill was full of glories ineffable. Feelings scrabbled about in him like a mouse inside an owl.”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, Where the World Ends

“Being irretrievably damned had its advantages:”
― Geraldine McCaughrean, Where the World Ends

“This place – this part of the Peak District – has its own particular winter smell. It followed me on a walk today: a very long one.”
― Tom Cox, Help the Witch

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“When Poemen was asked how he dealt with any brother who fell asleep during public prayer, he replied, ‘I put his head upon my knees and help him to rest.”
― Benedicta Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

“The point of the wild-track is that every silence is different and distinctive. Each is charged with the murmurs of the landscape around it, with the personalities of those who have entered it and remain present within it, together with the memories of conversations which have come and gone. It has been well said that silence ‘has no opposite and is the ground of both sound and the absence of sound’.2 It is an ambassador between the mundane and the sublime, solving tensions and miseries which words cannot touch.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“the same metaphors and themes sound again and again in mystic discourse, like a muffled peal of bells in English change-ringing.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History

“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“What I stand for is what I stand on.”
― Wendell Berry

“XIV SUN ALIGNMENT”
― Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones

“The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.”
― Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope.”
― Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality And The Twelve Steps

“the goodness that each thing hath, it is He.”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“I look singularly to myself, I am right nought;”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

“To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with a light and superficial knowledge, nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of:”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“At this spot, for some reason known only to itself, the Folly brook turned at a right angle. Beneath the oak the water had washed away the sandy bank, and many winter floods had laid bare some of the massive hawser roots which projected in a twisted tangle from the soil of the bank. The sun, shining full on the steep bluff, threw shadows from the overhanging roots, so that underneath all was darkness.”
― B.B., The Little Grey Men