Cornwall

This is the landscape that has altered my life. The house in its setting is the source of all my painting.

(Patrick Heron)

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of Distance.

(Charles Lindburgh)

Cornwall

The inhabitants of Britain who dwell about the headland of Belerium are unusually hospitable and have adopted a civilized manner of life because of their intercourse with foreign traders. It is they who work the tin, extracting it by an ingenious method. 

(Pytheas c300-380BC)

Another Cornish tradition is to the effect that Joseph of Arimathea came in a boat to Cornwall and bought the boy Jesus with him: and the latter taught him how to extract tin and purge it of the wolfram. When the tin is flashed, then the tinner shouts, "Joseph was in the trade".

(Baring Gould. Cornwall)

Cornwall

Landscape by itself is meaningless, but it works on our feelings in profound ways, arousing in us a sense of ourselves in relation to the outside world.

(Christopher Neve.Unquiet Landscape)

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

(Andrew Wyeth)

Porlock & Clovelly

On awakening he appeared to himself to have distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen and ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on buisness from Porlock, and detained him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas ! without the restoration of the latter.


(Samuel Taylor Coleridge on being disturbed whilst writing Kubla Khan. 1797)

My dear father had been killed by the Doones of Bagworthy, while riding home from Porlock market on the Saturday evening. With him were six brother-farmers all of them very sober; for father would have no company with any man who went beyond half-a-gallon of beer, or a single gallon of cider.

(R D Blackmore. Lorna Doone)

Avebury

Just before I visited this place, to endeavour at preserving the memory of it, the inhabitants were fallen into the custom of demolishing the stones, chiefly out of covetousness of the little area of ground each stood on.


(Arbury a Temple. William Stukely MD 1690)

I painted a few pictures of pumpkins. But after I saw all the pumpkins that other people did, I stopped painting them. That ruined it for me -The imitators quickly take the charisma out of it.

(Andrew Wyeth)

Venice

In the winter,Venice is like an abandoned theatre, the play is finished but the echo's remain.

(Arbit Blatas)

A city for beavers.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Venice

A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.

(John Ruskin)

There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.

(Mary Shelley)

Whitby

The waves rose with growing fury, each over-topping its fellow, till in a very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and devouring monster. White-crested waves beat madly on the level sands and rushed up the shelving cliffs. Others broke over the piers, and with their spume swept the lanthorns of the lighthouses which rise from the end of either pier of Whitby harbour.

(Bram Stoker. Dracula)

But in those remote days the one inn of Whitby was up a back yard, and oyster shell grottoes were the only view fom the best private room.

(From the Letters of Charles Dickens)

South Wales

"In those days, the blag slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of the hill. Not enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers between the green"

(Philip Dunne screenplay based on 'How Green was my Valley' by Richard Llewellyn)

By noon 436 of the men who had descended the mine for the days work had been bought safely to the surface. Leaving 485 still below.

For these caught in the immediate theatre of the blast, there seemed little hope, for to  the horrer of the blast there had been added the terror of fire and no rescue party, however intrepid, and there was no lack of brave men ready to answer the call of the most forlorn hope-could live through that raging furnace.

(South Wales Daily News Wednesday October 15th 1913. Report of the  Senghenydd Colliery Disaster)

Brighton

Rose: "People change"

Ida: "I've never changed,it's like one of those sticks of rock. Bite one all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. Thats human nature."

(Brighton Rock. Graham Greene)

Ever since I was a young boy,

I've played the silver ball.

From Soho down to Brighton,

I must have played them all.

(Pinball Wizard. The Who)

Santorini

Anybody can become angry-that is easy, but to become angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way-that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

(Aristotle)

I am indepted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

(Alexander the Great)