Flora Thompson

and so the shadows ripple on until it's time to part

"Coming events cast their shadows before" quoted the clergyman...

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 …

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.

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...

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.

"I don't believe in folks making a sort of mystery of themselves. I believe in being neighbourly , I do".

Some kind of contact with earth, however second hand or muffled, is still a prime necessity of humankind. We each of us have our own particular earthly paradise, a spot on earth for which our thoughts turn while our bodies are far distant, …

A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except …

Pale purple as the bloom on 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.

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. — (ch. 11, School)

Other days, other ways; and, although they have now been greatly improved upon, the old country midwives did at least succeed in bringing into the world many generations of our forefathers, or where should we be now? — (ch. 8, 'The Box' )

'Poverty's no disgrace, but 'tis a great inconvenience' was a common saying among the Lark Rise people. — (ch. 1, Poor People's Houses)

'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. — (ch. 1, Poor People's Houses)

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 …

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