Quotes by Thomas Hill Green

“I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens.””

“(From where I sit and write at this moment, I look out the window, across the quiet guest-house garden, with the four banana trees and the big red and yellow flowers around Our Lady’s statue. I can see the door where Dan entered and where I entered. Beyond the Porter’s Lodge is a low green hill where there was wheat this summer. And out there, yonder, I can hear the racket of the diesel tractor: I don’t know what they are ploughing.)””

“There was a time in the beginning when I too questioned the plan”

“I liked being on top of that tip. It was high. Even the wind in winter when it was high and seemed in a mood to toss me about two miles, I did not dislike it, for I dislike only those people and things that harm me and know they harm. From this summit I could see for great distances. To the south ran the fat green plain, full of plants and farmers and other voters I knew little of, and that plain finished with the sea. The sea did not interest me because the urge to fish was never in my family, and there were plenty of places to drown in inside the hills.To the north ran ranges of hills till the eye lost them. On each new hill there would most likely be some element like Oscar owning it, and between the hills, on the valley sides, elements like Danny getting it in the neck and going black in the face because of it. It all seemed very endless and unsweet and I never felt that I would like to leave the mountain on which I stood and travel over the mountains I could see to the farthest distance. There was no mystery in them. I knew and did not love the life that crawled between the cracks.””

“First up were these dainty heirloom vegetables, speared like lollipops on a "fence" of fine metal pricks. "I'm not a minimalist by nature," the chef explains of this simple yet exquisite dish, "but sometimes the stuff we get from the farm is so perfect, I feel like I shouldn't do much with it: just vegetables, naked, with salt and a little lemon vinaigrette." Andrew and I plucked the carrots, fennel, radishes, and greens one by one, relishing the powerful flavor contained within each, along with the snap, crunch, and wholesomeness. So simple and pure.But it wasn't all so austere. We moved on to luscious potato gnocchi, fresh tilefish from Montauk, and my favorite, duck. Blue Hill gets its ducks from a local farm called Garden of Spices, where they're raised on grass, something that is rarely done in this country. "We cold smoke the legs for several hours- tenderizing the muscles from all that activity- and roast the breasts on the bone.””

“Thomas Lynde--a meek little man whom Avonlea people called "Rachel Lynde's husband"--was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert out to have been sowing his on the big red brook field away over by Green Gables.””

“It was a tough night," Marcus said briefly, another humorless smile crossing his mouth. "But they got what they paid for." "Jesus," Thomas murmured. Marcus slanted a glance at him, and his green eyes were hard, brittle. "Don't think about it, pet. I don't. No one who lives it dwells on this fucking stuff. You just thank God or your own balls for getting yourself through it, pulling yourself up into something better. The day I see pity in your face, I want your fucking ass out of my life.””