Norfolk Quotes

'Let any stranger find mee so pleasant a county, such good way, large heath, three such places as Norwich, Yar. and Lin. in any county of England, and I'll bee once again a vagabond to visit them.'

Sir Thomas Browne

'Often times within the circle of your sight there is neither house nor man visible. A grey church tower, a windmill, or the dark-brown sail of a wherry in the distance breaks the sense of utter loneliness, but the scene is wild enough to enchain the imagination of many.'

George Christopher Davis (1884)

'I am a Norfolk man and Glory in being so.'

Horatio Nelson

'I am still reeling with delight at the soaring majesty of Norfolk.'

John Betjeman

'Very flat, Norfolk.'

Noel Coward (Private Lives)

'My dear, never go there, it's a dreadful place; I assure you no one in Norfolk ever calls till the third generation!'

Overheard by Lilias Rider Haggard's cousin

'The Norfolk landscape sends a shiver through my soul....'

Raffaella Barker

'It is an ancient market town that stands
Upon a lofty cliff of mouldering sands;
The sea against the cliffs doth daily beat,
And every tide into the land doth eat.'

John Taylor, the Water Poet (on Cromer)

'Once you get to know Norfolk, there is no better place to live.'

John Timpson

'Satan on the road to Hell
Ruined Norfolk as he fell.'

Anon. 12th Century, The Soil and Climate of Norfolk

'All England may be carved out of Norfolk.'

Thomas Fuller, 1662

'Lovers of Norfolk churches can never agree which is the best and I think one is either a Salle or a Cawston man.'

John Betjeman

'People are proud of it, they like it and it is a county in which one feels at home.'

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner

'Oh! rare and beautiful Norfolk.'

John Sell Cotman

'The charm of Norfolk is not so readily definable as that of some other counties. It has the ungrudging roominess of a kingdom. It is littered with villages but uncluttered by towns.'

Reginald Pound

'There are few places in England where you can get so much wildness and desolation of sea and sandhills, wood, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk.'

W.H. Hudson

'If the rest of Britain sank beneath the waves, and Norfolk was left alone, islanded in the turmoil of the seas, it would, I think, survive without too much trouble.... Norfolk has always stood alone and aloof from the rest of England.'

James Wentworth Day

'Norfolk would not be Norfolk without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.'

Sir John Betjeman

'My name is Billy Bluelight, my age is 45, I hope to get to Carrow Bridge before the boat arrive.'

Billy Bluelight

'Do Different.'

Norfolk's motto

'Most people have got at least one foot in the water,' said Mrs Barrable, 'and they do say a lot of the babies are born web-footed, like ducks.'

Coot Club by Arthur Ransome

'My wife's old dumplings are Norfolk and good.'

The Kipper Family

'See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads.'

David Bowie, Life on Mars

'I am truly amazed and half alarmed to find the County filled with little Revolution Societies.'

Fanny Burney

'A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.'

John Betjeman, Norfolk

'In that country of luminous landscapes and wide horizons where the wind runs in the reeds and the slow rivers flow to our cold sea, a man may still sense and live something of the life of the older England which was uninhibited, free and natural.'

Alan Savory, Norfolk Poacher

'P.S. - Aunt Agatha, she say "Mirages dew still happen," for she was a-picken a' oranges on Porlin beach a Christmas mornin!'

Sidney Grapes, The Boy John

'When the sea comes in at Horsey Gap
Without any previous warning,
A swan shall build its rushy nest
On the roof of the Swan at Horning.'

Anon.

'Norfolk has been a favourite county since childhood. It provides the "still centre" when all around is turmoil.'

Edward Storey

'Norfolk is cut off on three sides by the sea and on the fourth by British Rail.'

Local saying

'What a coast this is, with its salt marshes and lavender, its channels, dunes, bays and crumbling Ice Age cliffs, lonelier and wilder than its Suffolk neighbour, Arctic, melancholic, beautiful, treacherous, with sandbanks and quicksands, storms and floods, and never-ending erosion.'

Peter Sager

'For society, of all places I have ever been, Norwich is the best.'

Robert Southey

'My spiritual transformation took place in Norwich: it was there that, like an emerging butterfly, I was first conscious of my wings.'

Leo in The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

'What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!'

J. B. Priestley

'Yes, there it (Norwich) spreads from north to south, with its venerable houses, its numerous gardens, its thrice twelve churches, its mighty mound, which, if tradition speaks true, was raised by human hands to serve as a grave-heap of an old heathen king, who sits deep within it, with his sword in his hand, and his gold and silver treasures about him.'

George Borrow, Lavengro

'For how much longer, in the relentless clamour for yet more houses, retail parks and road schemes, will this 'otherness' survive, and will its demise spell the end of a distinctive literary tradition in the region?'

Peter Tolhurst

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