Flora Thompson Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Other days, other ways! For myself I would desire a combination of old romance and modern machinery. No housewife would wish to the return to the era when everything, had to be made at home by candlelight and which lost to us who knows how many women poets and painters!

Flora Thompson
And so the shadows ripple on
until it's time to part

Flora Thompson
Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too.

Flora Thompson
There was no Victoria in the school... That great name was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the extent imagined by period novelists of today.

Flora Thompson
Pale purple as the bloom om a ripe plum, veined with the gold of late flowering gorse, set with small slender birches, just turning yellow, with red-berried rowans and thicket of bracken, the heath lay steeped in sunshine.

Flora Thompson
'Thank God for my good dinner. Thank Father and Mother. Amen' was the grace used in one family, and it certainly had the merit of giving credit where credit was due.

Flora Thompson
The harvest-home or supper is a thing of the past. To those who feel the fascination of the past this may appear sad, but it is not so really for, even while it existed, this surface goodwill was often an empty show.

Flora Thompson
They didn't want votes, either. A vote wasn't going to raise wages or make bread cheaper. What did it matter to them what Government was in power.

Flora Thompson
And so with us, she thought. We come, we go, and, as individuals, we are forgotten. But the stream of human life goes on, ever changing, but ever the same, and as the stream is fed by well-springs hoarded by Nature so the stream of humanity is fed by the store of accumulated wisdom and effort and hard-won experience of past generations.

Flora Thompson
It was ordained that our earthly pilgrammage should be a struggle, and life would be a tame affair if everything went smoothly.

Flora Thompson
Nature knows no calendar, the seasons move in a circle.

Flora Thompson
You can lock up from a thief, but you can't from a liar.

Flora Thompson
They had not much original wit, but had inherited a stock of cheerful sayings which passed as such.

Flora Thompson
So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up.

Flora Thompson
Manner and morals have improved, improved wages and world travel during the war have had effect, and the farm labourer now is an intelligent, self respecting workman, on a level at least with the town artisan. The village rustic of the past no longer exists outside of the comic papers.

Flora Thompson
It was still the custom of the countryside to build with local materials produced as close to the selected site as possible, for transport was difficult, even the best of country roads being more fitted for horseback traffic rather than heavy loads.

Flora Thompson
Alas! in nature, as in art, we gain only according to our capacity. You cannot put an ocean in a pint pot.

Flora Thompson
I do not compare the past with the present without a prejudice for either, but, great as the improvement in country life is in many respects, it seems a pity the old cheap, wholesome dishes have gone to make way for tinned and preserved foods.

Flora Thompson
Readers have no doubt noticed how seldom builders live in houses of their own construction. You will find a town or village expanding in all directions with their masterpieces of modernity in the way of houses and bungalows; but the builder himself you will usually find living nearer the heart of things, snugly and comfortably housed in some more substantial, if less convenient, building of less recent date.

Flora Thompson
Strict honesty was the policy of most of them; although there were a few who were said to 'find anything before 'tis lost' and to whom findings were keepings.

Flora Thompson
What greater restoratives have we poor mortals than a good meal taken in the company of loving friends?

Flora Thompson
The wife ought to have the first child and the husband the second, then there wouldn't ever be any more.

Flora Thompson
Any artwork needs time and patience and needs above a quiet mind.

Flora Thompson
The children did not remain children long. Boys of seven or eight went to work in the fields... Girl children of ten or eleven sent out into service...

Flora Thompson
Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

Flora Thompson
Our poet's singing lips are dumb:
This his last gift, to us has brought
The pain pressed vintage of his thought
His life of song, his life of pain,
And, being dead, he speaks again.

Flora Thompson
Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually.

Flora Thompson
It was a morning of ground mist, yellow sunshine, and high rifts of blue, white-cloud-dappled sky. The leaves were still thick on the trees, but de-spangled gossamer threads hung on the bushes and the shrill little cries of unrest of the swallows skimming the green open park spaces of the park told of autumn and change.

Flora Thompson
It was a hard life, but, physically, they throve on it, the men standing up well to the hard labour of the fields and the women, in addition to their washing, scrubbing and cooking and nursing, bearing a child almost annually.

Flora Thompson
Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed ", and I think he was right.

Flora Thompson