As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning Quotes

“For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city--that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“But I think my most lasting impression was still the unhurried dignity and noblesse with which the Spaniard handled his drink. He never gulped, panicked, pleaded with the barman, or let himself be shouted into the street. Drink, for him, was one of the natural privileges of living, rather than the temporary suicide it so often is for others. But then it was lightly taxed here, and there were no licensing laws; and under such conditions one could take one's time.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn't be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“And as I lay there listening, with the sun filtering across me, I thought this was how it should always be. To be charmed from sleep by a voice like this, eased softly back into life, rather than by the customary brutalities of shouts, knocking, and alarm-bells like blows on the head. The borders of consciousness are anxious enough, raw and desperate places; we shouldn’t be dragged across them like struggling thieves as if sleep was a felony.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“Valladolid: a dark square city hard as its syllables – a shut box, full of the pious dust and preserved breath of its dead whose expended passions once ruled a world which now seemed of no importance. The motor car had dropped me in the middle of it, on this evening of red stale dust, to find myself surrounded by churches and crypt-like streets bound by the rigidity of sixteenth-century stone. There was little life to be seen in the listless alleys, and the street lamps were hooded by a mysterious thickness of the light. I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city – that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“It never occurred to me that others had done this before me.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“By early summer the flats were almost completed, and I knew I would soon be out of a job. There was no prospect of another, but I wasn’t worried; I never felt so beefily strong in my life. I remember standing one morning on the windy roof-top, and looking round at the racing sky, and suddenly realizing that once the job was finished I could go anywhere I liked in the world.
There was nothing to stop me, I would be penniless, free, and could just pack up and walk away. I was a young man whose time coincided with the last years of peace, and so was perhaps luckier than any generation since. Europe at least was wide open, a place of casual frontiers, few questions and almost no travellers.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

“Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.”
― Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning