Quotes About Wilderness

accurately be termed wasteland

A tortured note of desperate fatalism runs through his poetry, as in remote landscapes he celebrates the savagery, the howling wilderness.

Australian inland taipan is the most poisonous snake on earth—its bite will kill you in seconds. But none of this ought seriously to deter anyone from confronting the outback on foot, or even on all fours.

Primeval forest,' he said. 'Original forest.' 'Wouldn't you like to build a house here and live alone with your wife?' 'Yes,' he said. 'Have a family and write something-poems and stories.' 'Maybe have four children.' 'It is not permitted,' he said. Then he smiled. 'But this is so far they wouldn't know. It wouldn't matter. Yes, I would like that.

She let them go all night and in the mornings would find them coming toward her where she slept, with that alert and nervous air unridden horses always have at dawn. They are remembering some far time when predators came for them at first light. So they came toward her with the strange and painful air of fallen angels, treading carefully and slowly as if the earth were foreign soil.

The desert is a capricious lady, and sometimes she drives men crazy.

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.

The way one approaches a wilderness story is to fashion a quest - find something that you are truly interested in finding or discovering.

I was silenced by a bone-shattering roar. Turning, I saw a huge, dark bear lurching over the top of a snow-drift. It landed heavily, shook its snout, snarled, fixed its gaze on me — then lunged, teeth flashing, claws exposed, hell-bent on tearing me apart!

In the forest, we boys were food.

For a century, environmentalism has divided itself into warring camps: conservationists versus preservationists.... The struggle pits those who would meddle with nature against those who would leave it be.... The only sensible way forward lies in a melding of the two philosophies. If nature has grown artificial, then restoring wilderness requires human intervention. We must manage nature in order to leave it alone.

It wasn't his place to judge the women. Theirs was the harder job, here in the wilderness. His tasks were simple—to hunt, fight, and if need be, to die. Theirs was to go on, whatever it took.

The wilderness is a place of rest—not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.

Wolf-Spiders Ruleth the Land

The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.

we get old like animals. We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we're baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive / That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?

For now I stand as one upon a rock Environed with a wilderness of sea.

saying something in German, then at the mountain man's

William W. Johnstone