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Quote by Nan Shepherd

“Life recommenced. Dogs barked, cocks crew, smoke rose, men shouted, women clattered their milk pails. Soon figures moved upon the empty fields. Somewhere a plough was creaking. Garry turned turned his head towards the noise and searched the brown earth until he saw the team. Seagulls were crying after it, settling in the black furrow, rising again to wheel around the horses. As he watched, the sun reached the field. The wet new-turned furrow was touched to light as though a line of fire had run along it. The flanks of the horses gleamed. They tossed their manes, lifting their arched necks and bowing again to the pull: brown farm horses, white nosed, white-footed, stalwart and unhurrying as the earth they trampled or the man who held the share.”

Quote by Nan Shepherd

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The Weatherhouse

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Nan Shepherd

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“Around him he noted that the woods were flaming. A fine flame was playing over the leafless branches, not gaudy like the fires of autumn, but strong and pure. The trees,not now by accident of life but in themselves, were again etherialised. For a brief space, in spring, before the leaf comes, the life in trees is like a pure and subtle fire, in buds and boughs. Willows are like yellow rods of fire, blood-red burns in sycamore and scales off in floating flakes as the bud unfolds and the sheath is loosened. Beeches and elms, all dull beneath, have webs of golden and purple brown upon their spreading tops. Purple blazes in the birch twigs and smoulders darkly in the blossom of the ash. At no other season are the trees so liitle earthly. Mere vegetable matter they are not. One understands the dryad myth, both the emergence of the vivid delicate creature and her melting again in her tree; for in a week, a day, the foliage thickens, she is a tree again.”

“Good old days? Whatever good in them may have been, they’re long past. No use crying over them now when they are but distant memories. I shall tell you the trick – in a person’s mind, all distant memories eventually grow tinted with rays of sunshine, and the toils and hardships the flesh and the soul have undergone get lost and forgotten. Hence you begin believing that those old days were good, and have a hard time dealing with present difficulties… I believe, whatever hardship you may face at present, it is still better than some vague and blurry flashbacks you carry in your mind, for the present can be felt upon the touch, sensed upon the breath, lived through and fought for. Good old days are long gone, and if you ask me, have never been as good as you may now imagine. There is only now, and the bitterer it is, the sweeter it feels to live the moment to its fullest.”