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“In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes shape.”
― Sheri Reynolds

“I can’t get forensics over here to dig up the yard because my friend here, and her dog, didn’t hear a single thing. I don’t think they’ll go for it, Valerie.”
― Alyssa Hall, And Then I Heard The Quiet

“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“The footpath curves right, and my home’s roof ridge is visible through the coconut fronds. A streak of happiness lights up in my heart. I know it’s just a building, but I hear its frantic call, reaching out to me like a mother cow that has lost its calf. Is this what differentiates a home from a house—the life in the former, the soul breathed in by my grandparents, my parents, and me?”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“...but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")”
― Edith Wharton, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“The the street was quiet again. Country quiet.

That's partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought: the quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle, a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing, wholesome glow when it was weighed out from the back of a traffic jam, or while crammed into a gardenless apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat home-grown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work.

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared form sight, they looked around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.

Soon, they discovered that the veggies didn't grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.

Falk didn't blame the Whitlams, he'd seen it many times before when he was a kid. The arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing. "I didn't know it was like this."

He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids' paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry

“When once thou shalt be able to now read the glories of heroes and thy father's deeds, and to know virtue as she is, slowly the plain shall grow golden with the soft corn-spike, and the reddening grape trail from the wild briar, and hard oaks drip of honey.”
― Virgil

“So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumm.”
― Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer

“The closer you get to the countryside, the closer you get to your distant past because historically you came from the countryside and the closer you get to the places you exist, the more peaceful you feel!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The city houses are certainly of great splendor and conveniency to a gentleman...But perhaps he will not reap much less utility and consolation from the country house; where time will be passed in seeing and adorning his own possessions, and by industry, and the art of agriculture, improving his estate; where also by the exercise which in a villa is commonly taken, on foot and horseback, the body will more easily preserve its strength and health; and finally, where the mind, fatigued by the agitations of the city, will be greatly restored and comforted, and be able to quietly attend to the studies of letters and contemplation. Hence it was the ancient sages commonly used to retire to such like places; where...they could easily attain to as much happiness as can be attained here below.”
― Palladio Andrea (1508-1580)

“And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives or, at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edmund.”
― Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

“Everyone walks everywhere in country towns, especially the children. Although most are unaware of its impact, it automatically connects bodies to the land. All the temperature changes are keenly felt when little divides the body from its surroundings.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“In the country, there are unseen eyes and ears everywhere. They may not be many in number, but they are highly perceptive. That’s what happens when you live in a quiet environment. You notice everything.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“Sometimes I used to hear a farmer speaking sharp and loud to his servants; but it was so far away that it only reminded me pleasantly that other people were hard at work in some distant place, while I just sat on the heather and did nothing.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North & South

“What was stolen by the city, nature restores.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“The autumn was a happy time. The crops around the countryside were good, and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year. After the long hot summer the first cool days had a clean bright sweetness. Goldenrod grew along the dusty roads, and the sugar cane was ripe and purple. The bus came each day from Cheehaw to carry a few of the younger children to the consolidated school to get an education. Boys hunted foxes in the pinewoods, winter quilts were aired out on the wash lines, and sweet potatoes bedded in the ground with straw against the colder months to come. In the evening, delicate shreds of smoke rose from the chimneys, and the moon was round and orange in the autumn sky. There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall. Sometimes, late in the night when there was no wind, there could be heard in the town the thin wild whistle of the train that goes through Society City on its way far off to the North.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Member of the Wedding.

“The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump fung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.”
― Robert Frost, New Hampshire

“Bush men are understated in just about every way—their words, their affection, their need for things. They don’t need much of anything. They’re understated except when it comes to hard work and duty. Their resilience and determination to get out into the paddocks every day, to an extent, keeps the cemetery at bay. Being outside, in the elements, adds substantial weight to their life force.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“After a global pandemic and the crisis in American cities, more and more people are discovering the gift of rural life, learning that it's better for their families---and for their souls. Rural communities are at the heart of our American story: they are people taking risks to earn a living off the land.”
― Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland

“Cows are one thing, but you don't fuck with a man's dog.”
― C.J. Box, Trophy Hunt

“Temples in general are notoriously cold places because they tend to be old, and even today they rarely have central heating. ... I got a sense of the hardship of winter in old Japan when I visited our family temple one February... I wore a hat, heavy sweater, wool socks, and two pairs of pants, and still I shivered under the kotatsu.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their lives
melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller

“Whatever the reason for their choices, too many country men saw the best years of their lives melt with the ice cubes in the bottom of an empty whiskey glass.”
― Mark E. Miller

“Go somewhere where you won't hear the sound of cars! Let the moonlight see you; let the silent hedgehogs pass you by; let the scent of honeysuckle meet your nose; hear the owl's hoot; greet a shooting star; if you see flickering candles instead of electric lights in the windows of stone houses, look, my friend, you are truly in a beautiful place, drink in that beauty to your heart's content, let your soul revive!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“She was pleasantly surprised at how much remained. Her parents had abandoned a heap of old Caltreyan clothes. Selecting one of the island dresses, Kiela shook it out. Dust plumed in the air. The skirt was a quilt of blue--- sky blue, sapphire blue, sea blue--- all stitched together with silvery thread and hemmed with silver ribbon, and the bodice was a soft white blouse. Not at all a city style, but it was perfect for a picnic in a garden or a stroll on a shore. With a few repairs, she could wear a lot of her mother's abandoned clothes, and she could use her father's for... She wasn't sure what, but they were nice to have. She'd find a use for them. If nothing else, she could chop the fabric up into cleaning rags. Or perhaps learn to quilt? There was a moth-eaten blanket in one closet, in addition to the old quilts on the daybed and her parents' bed. Each quilt had its own pattern--- one was comprised of colors of the sunset and sewn in strips like rays of light, while another was the brown and pale green of a spring garden with pieces cut like petals and sewn like abstract flowers. We left so many beautiful things behind. She'd had no idea. She'd been too little to help much with the packing, though she remembered she'd tried. Carrying an armful of clothes into the kitchen, Kiela dumped them into the sink to soak in water. She planned to use the excess line from the boat to hang them out in the sun to dry. They'll be even more beautiful once they're clean.
The kitchen cabinet produced more treasures: a few plates, bowls, and cups. Each bowl was painted with pictures of strawberries and raspberries, and the plates were painted with tomatoes and asparagus. The teacups bore delicate pictures of flowers.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop

“In the city, people often feel lonely amongst so many people, but country towns, being more codependent, tend to be more connected.”
― Donna Goddard

“Thus, she begin her own journey. Along the way, she will transform into Unniyachi, the aboriginal mother, into Kanchana Seetha and Sree Kurumba; into Vanadurga, the goddess of the forest, and Jaladurga, the goddess of the water; and into Kali, the primordial power.

She will ride the waves between life and myth into the darkness of stories that are brighter than light.

Through fields of marigolds to the slope of Kannanthalikunnu...

To forest verges where the chempakam blooms...
To screw-pine-scented canal banks...
To riverbanks red with the blood of revolution...

Through it all, Manjadikunnu will keep her company, silently, as the night of stories unfolds.”
― Sheela Tomy, Valli