Quotes About Wilderness

just as twenty years ago, everyone knew John Colter and Jim Bridger.

The badlands, the place where the earth itself was misshapen, where the gods had destroyed the ancient animals and hurled their bones into the earth.

By snowshoe, canoe, or dog team, they moved through those woods, rivers, and lakes. It was not a life circumscribed by a clock, stamp, fence, or road.

Things is very primitive in the jungle - no place to shit, sleep on the ground like an animal, eat out of cans, no place to take a bath or nothing, clothes is all rotting off.

him. When an animal is

its almost as if he was raised by wolves, but wolves who knew the value of a decent education.

know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.

If you are antisocial, far northern Maine is the place for you. Of course, other preferences and characteristics besides not liking to have people around would help as well. You should be rugged, like living off the land, not care very much about eating out and cable TV, and have a healthy disdain for paved roads.

The place where we spend most of our lives moulds our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings. A human-engineered habitat of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild.

Ancient forests that took millennia to evolve are called "decadent" or "overmature," so clearing them is justified by the notion that they are finished or at an end. Sometimes the forest industry labels such forests "wild," and what is planted and grown after it has been clear-cut is called a "normal" forest. We define things in terms of human utility, not in any way that makes ecological or even biological sense.

It was as if he'd arrived at the center of himself after a long journey through the wilderness of his own soul.

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died—with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else.

Anyway, it's two in the morning and we're taking turns pissing off of the tower (rather than going at the same time, because we weren't raised by wolves). So it's my turn and I'm right at that transcendent moment when the long stream of urine connects me and the ground below...

And I, through the reflecting pools of his deep–set eyes—I saw a savage man I did not like.

The voice in the wilderness echoes in eternity because it isn't drowned by temporal applause

Second rule of the bush. Never get too close to anything that has offspring. What's the first rule? Food runs. If you don't want to be food, don't run.

To grow unique beauty, be wild and live in the wilderness of your mind.

Life itself is the journey of the mind toward the unknown infinite wilderness. Get lost.

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

De los bosques salían ménades y sátiros furiosos que exterminaban aldeas enteras. Sólo mataban, sin saquear como hacían los humanos, puesto que aquellos seres de la espesura no ambicionaban posesiones materiales.

wilderness is a ferocious intoxication which sweeps over your senses with rinsing vitality, leaving you stripped to the vivid, your senses rubbed until they shine. It is an untouched place which touches you deeply and its aftermath - when landscape becomes innerscape - leaves you elated, awed and changed utterly. Forget the lullaby balm of nature tame as a well-fed lawn, here nature has a lean and violent, waking grandeur which will not let you sleep …

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

Gene Autry riding into coral skyline while the cacti stand up ancient and timeless