Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life

“Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.””

— W. H. Hudson

“Boys are always inarticulate where their deepest feelings are concerned; however much they may desire it they cannot express kind and sympathetic feelings.””

— W. H. Hudson

“In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.””

— W. H. Hudson

“It was only one of a dozen or twenty vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world.””

— W. H. Hudson

“The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's Inferno, for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally; but it is not so with smells.””

— W. H. Hudson

“When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is”

— W. H. Hudson

“My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.””

— W. H. Hudson

“I could yet always feel that it was infinitely better to be than not to be. THE””

— W. H. Hudson

“I was just about half-way through my sixth year, when one morning at breakfast we children were informed to our utter dismay that we could no longer be permitted to run absolutely wild””

— W. H. Hudson