Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist In Andalucía Quotes
"Well, this is no good, I don’t want to live here!"
"It has the advantage of being a long way from the nearest golf course."
"I don’t want to see any more of this sort of thing."
"It’s owned by a number of people, and they don’t all want to sell."
"Listen, you’re to keep quiet unless I prompt you."
"It’s snuggled into a nice little nook in a river valley."
"There’s no point in going any further. I’ll have that one."
"It has electricity – a solar panel, so you have no electricity bills."
"You’ve bought paradise for pennies, but what could we do?"
"That could well be difficult, under the water and that."
"We’re ruined, really we’ve given our home away…"
"But I must be off. I have to follow the beasts."
"There was a plan about twenty-five years ago to put a dam across the gorge."
"Here there’s the best of everything in the world."
"The creature with lowest priority on the road was the car."
"We’re poor as can be and life is nothing but drudgery and pain."
"It’s not a good idea to be too hasty in these matters."
"The valley needs more children. I need more children."
"It’s one thing buying a peasant farm, it’s quite another buying the peasant with it."
"The warmth and comfort of a good bed shared with an agreeable companion have always triumphed over the potential excitements of a new day."
"Without that urge we would scarcely be human."
"The world of Johnson couplers, header-tanks, and back-pressure is one that I’d rather leave the lid on."
"Running water had finally arrived in the bathroom of El Valero."
"Rarely had I taken so much pleasure in that simple ritual."
"It's a strength, you know, as well as a weakness."
"It could fall about your ears at any moment."
"The charm of the style lies in its simplicity."
"The simple box-type structure is identical to that found in the Berber villages of Morocco."
"The whole, in a village, has to mesh with a mass of other similar dwellings huddled like the hexagons of a beehive."
"The entire journey the water makes is a delicate dance with gravity."
"I was getting nowhere, so I left the clearing and took up the shovel at the back of the gang."
"Eventually the distribution is nicely organised, with the water flowing just right."
"As evening falls, the swallows wing down from the houses and the rocks and skim above the water."
"I love the watering and I’m hoping that by the time I’ve notched up twenty or thirty years’ practice my neighbour might even admit that I know it."
"Cats should have names and, for some reason best forgotten, these became Brenda and Elfine."
"She watched lambs being born before she was one year old."
"How could I better explain gases? I’d made a muck of that one – probably arrested her development."
"It’s difficult to estimate the weight of a stone house, but surely it must be a hundred tons or more."
"Which Barbie do you think is the more beauty, this one or the pink one?"
"Being a part of a foreign community is a bit like being at school."
"Animals are a lot less trouble and serve you better too as a general rule."
"Life is but a breath. We come into this vale of sorrow, we’re here four days, and if we get a chance to do some little good, do someone a favour, then we’ve done well."
"She has reared two sets of twins since and the long period of treatment made her quite tame."
"I live in a state of confusion about the mysteries of the universe."
"The silence of the river was made more sinister by the insane screaming of the cicadas."
"The only way we are leaving is in a box – and not even then, as a matter of fact, as both Ana and I would like to be buried beneath an orange tree on the farm."
"It would be foolish to extol the virtues of poverty, but you can learn a lot from a few years of straitened circumstances."
"We had to make things work because that was how we fed ourselves."
"It’s the nicest critical review I’ve ever had."
"When you spend twenty-odd years building and gardening and planting trees on a plot of land, you develop a connection that runs deeper than the normal sense of ‘home’."
"I’ve loved farming since I discovered it at twenty-one, but if truth be told I’m not very good at it."
"I don’t think there’s anything better you can do in the middle of your life than to pick it up and shake it around a bit."
"Do something different, live somewhere different, talk another language."