"The trilogy enables us to appreciate for the first time what she has done both for literature and social history. By the playing of these soft pipes the hamlet, the village, and the small market town are reawakened at the very moment when the rich, glowing life and culture of an immemorial design for living was passing from them, at the precise point of meeting when the beginnings of what was to be touched the last lingering evidences of what was departing."

"[Over to Candleford is the] very essence of English life, faithful embroidery on the larger pattern of English history."

""Coming events cast their shadows before" quoted the clergyman..."

"There was no Victoria in the school ... That great name was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the extent imagined by period novelists of today. — (ch. 11, School)"

"No age can have everything and in material ways ours is more fortunate than any preceding one. Our ancestors appear to have mastered the art of living better than we are able to when an easy conscience, largely due to the unshaken faith of the time, left a marging of spiritual energy with which to enjoy life."

"A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except the scarcely perceptible never-ceasing sighing of the wind in the pines and its rustling of acres of heath-bells."

"Faithfully, shrewdly, she has set down her records, and it is hard to say which is the more remarkable—the exactness and detail of the outward scene or the rare objectivity."

"The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the purple heyday of heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations. — (ch. 15, Harvest Home)"

"Pale purple as the bloom on a ripe plum, veined with the gold of late flowering gorse, set with small slender birches, just turning yellow, with red-berried rowans and thicket of bracken, the heath lay steeped in sunshine."

"Some great poet or philosopher once said that " he who goes to nature for comfort must go to her empty handed " , and I think he was right."

"Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning powers must be brought to reinforce imagination."

"Any artwork needs time and patience and needs above all a quiet mind."

"Words as to the inner emotions do not come readily to me, for I have led an isolated life mentally and spiritually."

"And so with us, she thought. We come, we go, and, as individuals, we are forgotten. But the stream of human life goes on, ever changing, but ever the same, and as the stream is fed by well-springs hoarded by Nature so the stream of humanity is fed by the store of accumulated wisdom and effort and hard-won experience of past generations."

"'Thank God for my good dinner. Thank Father and Mother. Amen' was the grace used in one family, and it certainly had the merit of giving credit where credit was due. — (ch. 1, Poor People's Houses)"

"'Poverty's no disgrace, but 'tis a great inconvenience' was a common saying among the Lark Rise people. — (ch. 1, Poor People's Houses)"

"What is charm, it is not a moral quality.. it is not intellectual for no man by much thinking is able to add a grain of it to his personality. One either has it or has it not, it cannot be acquired or even cultivated. It is not physical even.. it seems to be added to the human personality, an aura, a glow, the gold dust upon a butterfly's wing, the bloom upon a peach."

"It was ordained that our earthly pilgrammage should be a struggle, and life would be a tame affair if everything went smoothly."

"It is the fashion to talk of our changing climate and bewail the hot summers and hard winters of tradition, but how seldom we pause to marvel at the remarkable constancy of the weather from year to year."

"So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up."

"Alas! in nature, as in art, we gain only according to our capacity. You cannot put an ocean in a pint pot."

"Nature knows no calendar, the seasons move in a circle."

"Manner and morals have improved, improved wages and world travel during the war have had effect, and the farm labourer now is an intelligent, self respecting workman, on a level at least with the town artisan. The village rustic of the past no longer exists outside of the comic papers."

"Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too."

""I don't believe in folks making a sort of mystery of themselves. I believe in being neighbourly , I do"."

"Other days, other ways! For myself I would desire a combination of old romance and modern machinery. No housewife would wish to the return to the era when everything, had to be made at home by candlelight and which lost to us who knows how many women poets and painters!"

"The harvest-home or supper is a thing of the past. To those who feel the fascination of the past this may appear sad, but it is not so really for, even while it existed, this surface goodwill was often an empty show."

"Some kind of contact with earth, however second hand or muffled, is still a prime necessity of humankind. We each of us have our own particular earthly paradise, a spot on earth for which our thoughts turn while our bodies are far distant, as the one place in all the world we would rather be.."

"Now, with the glamour of the past upon them we are inclined to look back on old world festivities with regret and consider present day dances as a poor substitute for the old. From an artistic point of view, they maybe, but in individual freedom and independence of spirit they mark a stage upward."

"I do not compare the past with the present without a prejudice for either, but, great as the improvement in country life is in many respects, it seems a pity the old cheap, wholesome dishes have gone to make way for tinned and preserved foods."

"Other days, other ways; and, although they have now been greatly improved upon, the old country midwives did at least succeed in bringing into the world many generations of our forefathers, or where should we be now? — (ch. 8, 'The Box' )"

"It was still the custom of the countryside to build with local materials produced as close to the selected site as possible, for transport was difficult, even the best of country roads being more fitted for horseback traffic rather than heavy loads."

"It was a hard life, but, physically, they throve on it, the men standing up well to the hard labour of the fields and the women, in addition to their washing, scrubbing and cooking and nursing, bearing a child almost annually."

"We cannot bring the good old days back but, if we must eat mass-made foods, get laws passed to insist upon its goodness and purity."

"They didn't want votes, either. A vote wasn't going to raise wages or make bread cheaper. What did it matter to them what Government was in power."

"The children did not remain children long. Boys of seven or eight went to work in the fields... Girl children of ten or eleven sent out into service..."

"“Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.” It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive."

"There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth."

"The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once."

"The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge."

"One said of suicide, “As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.” And another answered, “But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”"

"The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind."

"There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us."

"True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat."

"The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care."

"Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct."

"The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible."

"Of Optimism I have said that "The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.""

"I will begin with the self-styled "Christian" party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss."

"It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least."