Deep Country Quotes

“...the cold got into your bones, and no matter how many logs you threw on the fire, you never felt truly warm.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“This was the pattern of my days, a simple life led by natural rhythms rather than the requirements and expectations of others.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“One late-autumn day I opened the back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“Even the garden birds that we watch with pleasure at our bird-feeders are in a state of conflict: safety or hunger. When the weather is at its worst, more and more birds throng to the table, because the alternative to facing their fear is starvation. It is easy to sentimentalize nature, to forget that the prevailing forces at work – besides the urge to hold a territory and find a mate – are hunger and fear.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“Solitude embraced is the opposite of loneliness”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“Happiness is a full larder.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“Imagine being given the opportunity to take time out of your life, for five whole years. Free of social obligations, free of work commitments. Think how well you would get to know yourself, all that time to consider your past and the choices you had made, to focus on your personal development, to know yourself through and through, to work out your goals in life, your true ambitions.
None of this happened, not to me. Perhaps for someone else it would have been different. Any insight I have gained has been the result of later reflection. Solitude did not breed introspection, quite the reverse. My days were spent outside, immersed in nature, watching.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“The silence outside was reflected by a growing silence within. Any interior monologue quietened to a whisper, then faded away entirely.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“I certainly learned to be at ease with myself in the years I spent at Penlan, but it was not by knowing myself better – it was by forgetting I was there. I had become a part of the landscape, a stone.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“Winters here are hard. It is not so much the cold as the long nights, and I tended to sleep early and wake with first light to minimize the hours spent sitting in the darkness in forced immobility, idly tending the fire.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills