"What rage for fame attends both great and small! Better be damned than mentioned not at all."

"Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt, And every grin so merry draws one out."

"A fellow in a market town, Most musical, cried razors up and down."

"People may have too much of a good thing: Full as an egg of wisdom thus I sing."

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens…"

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse…"

"Besides the darkness of the night, many minor shadows cross our paths, making the hues of Life obscure. These are not…"