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Quote by Nan Shepherd

“Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving - she reflected - that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.”

Quote by Nan Shepherd

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The Quarry Wood

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Nan Shepherd

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“...I found a paradoxical happiness in realizing how little I knew of the realm of grasses and trees, and what pleasure could lie in acquiring even a slender store of knowledge. Starting anew brings a sense of renewal and possibility. I rapidly reached the limit of my understanding, losing my way in thickets of scientific language, absorbing gleams and glimmers of new information. The details slipped from my mind faster than the grass seeds that scattered as I walked, quicker than down blown from a dandelion. But each discovery, like the passage of a comet through the sky, enlarged my sense of the world and left behind excitement and warmth in my heart... and my gratitude to the hare expanded as my perception deepened.”

“I mean, It's a Wonderful Life was a box office flop in its time. If everyone who worked on that movie had known, could see how things were going to pan out in the short term, would they have even bothered to make it? And then the world would've lost out on something beautiful. Just because something doesn't make money or win awards doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Or doesn't deserve to exist. The job is alchemy. You take a hunk of rock and you try to turn it into gold, and the gold isn't even really the point." "Right, because the goal is immortality," I joke. "It's permanence," he says. "Not, like, having your name on the side of fucking airplane or skyscraper, or some shit like that. But bringing something intangible into the world that can live on without you. Something bigger than the person who made it. And even then, the goal is secondary to the process. The process is for us. It changes us in ways that can't be measured. At least, that's what I've always thought.”