Paul Kingsnorth Quotes & Sayings

upon a hyll stands a treow but this treow it has no stics no leafs. its stocc is gold on it is writhan lines of blud red it reacces to the heofon its roots is deop deop in the eorth. abuf the hyll all the heofon is hwit and below all the ground is deorc. the treow is scinan and from all places folcs is walcan to it walcan to the scinan treow locan for sum thing from it. abuf the tree flies a raefn below it walcs a wulf and deop in the eorth where no man sees around the roots of the treow sleeps a great wyrm and this wyrm what has slept since before all time this wyrm now slow slow slow this wyrm begins to mof — Paul Kingsnorth

aefry ember of hope gan lic the embers of a fyr brocen in the daegs beginnan brocen by men other than us. hope falls harder when the end is cwic hope falls harder when in the daegs before the storm the stillness of the age was writen in the songs of men so it is when a world ends who is thu i can not cnaw but i will tell thu this thing be waery of the storm be most waery when there is no storm in sight — Paul Kingsnorth

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066. — Paul Kingsnorth

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear. — Paul Kingsnorth

I'm increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do. — Paul Kingsnorth

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon. — Paul Kingsnorth

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that. — Paul Kingsnorth

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before. — Paul Kingsnorth

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. — Paul Kingsnorth

A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built. — Paul Kingsnorth

What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth. — Paul Kingsnorth

Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time. — Paul Kingsnorth

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action. — Paul Kingsnorth

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future. — Paul Kingsnorth

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect. — Paul Kingsnorth

Today, the real England sometimes feels like 50 million people driving around a motorway forever. — Paul Kingsnorth

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea. — Paul Kingsnorth

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do. — Paul Kingsnorth