Far Away and Long Ago Quotes

“Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“Boys are always inarticulate where their deepest feelings are concerned; however much they may desire it they cannot express kind and sympathetic feelings.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“It was only one of a dozen or twenty vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's Inferno, for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally; but it is not so with smells.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is—the sense of the supernatural in nature.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“I could yet always feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be. THE”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago

“I was just about half-way through my sixth year, when one morning at breakfast we children were informed to our utter dismay that we could no longer be permitted to run absolutely wild”
― W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“The sense of smell, which seems to diminish as we grow older, until it becomes something scarcely worthy of being called a sense, is nearly as keen in little children as in the inferior animals, and, when they live with nature, contributes as much to their pleasure as sight or hearing.”
― W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“When a person endeavours to recall his early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feautre in the landscape - hill or wood or tower or spire - touched and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; ther is no order, no sequence or regular progression - nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape.
It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's life - at all events of some lives - in some rare state of the mind, it is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever blotted out.”
― W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“the mystical faculty in me which produced those strange rushes or bursts of feeling”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago

“The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“One extraordinary feature of the private quintas or orchards and plantations in the vicinity of the Saladeros was the walls or hedges. These were built entirely of cows' skulls, seven, eight, or nine deep, placed evenly like stones, the horns projecting. Hundreds of thousands of skulls had been thus used, and some of the old, very long walls, crowned with green grass and with creepers and wild flowers growing from the cavities in the bones, had a strangely picturesque but somewhat uncanny appearance.”
― William Henry Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life