Quotes About Wilderness

For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it's gone.

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley.

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation. RODERICK NASH, WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND

Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul. He soon discovered, however, what Muir and Thoreau already knew: An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one's attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best….I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk.

la naturaleza es un lugar despiadado, al que le traen sin cuidado las esperanzas y anhelos de los viajeros. «Los

Alaska ejerce una atracción magnética sobre los soñadores e inadaptados que creen que los enormes espacios inmaculados de la Última Frontera llenarán el vacío de su existencia.

Por fin se había liberado de las ataduras, emancipado del mundo opresivo formado por sus padres y los que eran iguales que ellos, un mundo hecho de abstracciones, seguridad y bienestar material, un mundo en el que sentía como una dolorosa amputación la ausencia del latir puro y salvaje de la existencia. Al

the romantic waste places of the world.

I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

They saluted the last wolves. Sure, they devoured property, but they did so with enthusiasm and panache. The animals had to die, but the humans felt nostalgic about their passing.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

I believe that the wilderness is where God is found.

wolves are so frightening not because of their fangs and claws but because of their intelligence, because of their hunger.

Top hats in Paris and London were paid for with genocide along the Great Lakes of the wilderness.

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild; He has devoured the infant child. The infant child is not aware It has been eaten by a bear." "Infant Innocence

Where I am going, nothing of me will remain: yet, I'll drift through the voices of coyotes, drip into florets by a mountain rock.

Okay," he muttered to himself, "now if I was a brain-dead logger tromping around where I shouldn't and getting myself shot through the throat by a bunch of angry woodland spirits, where would I be?" A

There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property. This land and I are rewilding.

Bellow "Tell the range and all that's howling, the flickers of life beyond the weeds, the vulture's furrowed brow of flight, the blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle; tell the clowned-out clouds and the rain, and all that makes you go quiet again, tell them that you didn't come here to make a fuss, or break, or growl, or scream; tell them-crazy sky and stars between-tell them you didn't come to disturb the night air and throw a fit, then get down in the dark and do it.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into out own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.