Idyll Quotes

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The more enchanted the idyll, greater must be the pain of its ending.”
― Georgette Heyer, Venetia

“Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“You are too romantic! We have been dwelling in Arcadia my green girl: the rest of the world is not so golden as this retired spot. Only in fantasy does every circumstance conspire to make it inevitable that two people should fall in love! We should hardly have been more isolated had be been cast on a desert island together.”
― Georgette Heyer, Venetia

“Let Labor and Capital bicker amongst each other, while I, as idle Aristocracy, twiddle my fiddle in my pastoral idyll.”
― Pietros Maneos

“...all the little dos and don'ts, the petty prejudices and snobberies, the silly sentimentalities and religious hypocrisies that made up the veneer of what so many of Forster's contemporaries considered civilization. As Forster saw it, these little things blinded people to the values of the good life. They were distractions which stood between mankind and the liberty of spirit which is one essential to any real happiness. And they blocked human communication, the basis of mutual understanding, which is the other. "Only connect" was Forster's famed motto. While we are chained to shibboleths, we are still children. We are not serious, we play with life.”
― E.M. Forster, Four Novels – Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Howards End

“I write in order to live and I live in order to write, and I've come close to imagining that writing and living might merge completely: I would live in the company of dictionaries, deep in some provincial retreat, in the mornings I would go for a walk in the woods, in the afternoons I would blacken a few sheets of paper, in the evenings I would relax perhaps by listening to a bit of music.”
― Georges Perec, Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books

“Paradise Isle by Stewart Stafford

In superstitious guidance,
I discovered your shallows,
Ingénues' on naked dunes,
Edenites of Paradise Isle.

Tragedy and chance are but pirates;
One welcome, both shocking rogues,
Am I a castaway or a sleepwalker?
Let motivations as explorers gather.

Leaving footprints only we can see,
The wet sand, a camouflage ally,
We quit the beach and head inland,
As crabs in shade to the waterline crawl.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford