Blue Remembered Hills Quotes

“In the years since then there has been a gradual change in the climate of ideas with regard to the disabled. It had begun to dawn on the able-bodied world that it is possible to combine an unsatisfactory body with a perfectly satisfactory brain, and a personality at any rate as satisfactory as most other people's. Trailing somewhat behind that, but now beginning to emerge also, is the much more startling idea that the disabled may not only have normal brains and the ability to hold down normal jobs and the wish to join in normal recreations and be accepted for ourselves, just as people, but normal emotions also. That we may have the same emotional needs as anybody else, and the ability to satisfy those needs in each other, or even in the able-bodied.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“He loved me and didn't want me hurt. What was worse, he didn't even understand that I had the right to be hurt.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“As I said before, I took to miniature painting without a completely whole heart, on the advice of my elders and betters. Generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person's advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one's innermost self. But 'they' advised, and I bowed to the advice; and in this particular instance it was a good thing I did, because the advice turned out to be so resoundingly wrong that it turned me into another direction altogether. If I had gone on working in oils I might very well have been a dedicated but unsuccessful painter to this day.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“My mother was determined that I should be able to walk two miles. If you could walk two miles, she said, you could get to most places you needed to get to. Actually, this is a fallacy. The fact that you can, with great difficulty, and taking an unconscionably time about it, walk two miles, will not get you anywhere you need, or at any rate want, to go. There were times when a wheelchair would have added another dimension to my life, but that was a forbidden subject; and it was not until many, many years later, long after my father and I were alone, that I took the law into my own hands and bought one; and instantly, dazzled with the new freedom that it brought me, swept my father off to his old haunts on an Hellenic cruise.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“One night at the Old Vicarage that winter, we listened to Ivor Novello's "Perchance to Dream" on the wireless. It was only a few years old then, and its small, haunting, fragile hit-song 'We'll Gather Lilacs' was still a tune that one heard constantly, on the wireless, from orchestras in restaurants, being whistled in the street. To this day I have only to hear the first notes, in some programme of 'Golden Oldies', to go straight back to that time. What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“There was Sheila Walker who was six, and who, I am ashamed to say, Jean and I used to terrorize. She did ask for it - she grizzled and told tales - but still, we should not have fed her on dandelion leaves and then told her they were deadly poison. I see that now. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“He must have been one of those very special people, beloved of the gods, for whom time is elastic and can always be stretched out to play with a child.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“Above all, I soaked in the 'feel' of the downs, the warm sense of the ground itself actively holding one up; a sureness, a steadfastness; and the sense that one gets in down country of kinship with a land that has been mixed up with the life men since it and men began.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“Jean and I had, as I think a great many best friends have, a secret make-believe world of our own. We had only to say, 'Let's be Lilian and Diana,' and, as though it was a magical formula, step straight into a world that was as real to us as the world of school and parents and cornflakes for breakfast. . . .

In the summer after my father retired, Jean came to stay with me in North Devon. On the first morning, we retired to the rustic summerhouse. 'Let's be Lilian and Diana . . .'

But the magic formula no longer worked. We tried and tried; but we could only _act_ Lilian and Diana; we could not _be_ them any more. I suppose the break had been too long, and we were just too old. We went on trying for days, searching for the way in. But it was like searching for the lost door to a lost country. Finally, without anything actually being said between us, we gave up and turned to other things. But with Lilian and Diana, something of Jean and Rosemary had gone too: left behind the lost door to the lost country. It was one of the saddest experiences of my young life.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“My mother was the perfect Spartan mother. I have always been able to imagine her telling her sons to return from battle 'with their shields, or on them'. She did actually try it on my father at the start of the Second World War. He didn't take it kindly, and confided to me ruefully that he thought she rather fancied herself a Hero's Widow.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“Uncle Acton spent the whole of his working life in India, for the simple reason that he gave up work very young.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“She was wonderful; no mother could have been more wonderful. But ever after, she demanded that I should not forget it, nor cease to be grateful, nor hold an opinion different from her own, nor even, as I grew older, feel the need for any companionship but hers.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection

“The other thing I remember about the earlier and more active stages of my illness is having a black panther under my bed. After a while it was discovered that I was simply hallucinating as the result of too much arsenic in the medicine I was being given; but at the time it must have been even more terrifying for my parents than it was for me.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection