Henry Williamson

“Peace in Europe can only come through union in one economic system. The United States of Europe are overdue.”

“Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct.”

“The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'”

“Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.”

“Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.”

“I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.”

“In future, lots of things will be made from beans and fibres grown on the farmers' fields. This new science is called chemurgy. Plastics, for industry, will come from the soil.”

“The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone.”

“True idealists are rare; they are the dedicated workers, who would, if need be, die at the stake.”

“All beauty is truth, and all truth is compassionate. Few know that; fewer still can express it.”

“The tides which flow and lapse in the Bristol Channel are often distained by the freshets of many streams falling through wooded coombes below the moor.”

“Regeneration can come only through a change of heart in the individual.”

“Music comes from an icicle as it melts, to live again as spring water.”

“Every country in every war fights for freedom.”

“Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The child's mind must be set free.”

“If salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.”

“All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me.”

“The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.”

“Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses.”