Quotes About Wilderness

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

noted naturalist and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir,

GOING NUDE FOR NATURE.

How cool would it have been to live back when the wind and birds and avalanches sounded like Black Sabbath, and killing gave people these huge fucking hard-ons?

So now you're on the run,' Warrick said wistfully. 'Travelling the Dark Highway, a lone wolf. With your friend, who is another wolf. Two lone wolves. Two wolves, really. Not really alone. Two wolves in a car. Travelling. One of them naked and bloody. The other with her ass hanging out.

Wilderness is two things-fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health-terrestrial and human.

If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was.

It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy.

Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay adjacent to a military base.

I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind.

I remember thinking that I might be talking to the animals by the next morning. I might be rolling in the dirt, laughing hysterically under that merciless blue sky. Or I might find the brightness rising curious out of the top of my head, like a periscope—independent and lively, with nothing left beneath it but a husk.

It wasn't true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of . They didn't want the fearful unknown of a "pristine wilderness". They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either.

But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?" There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.

It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity.

Neanche la sua bellezza può essere compresa e, quando intravedi la bellezza nella desolazione, qualcosa dentro di te cambia. La desolazione cerca di colonizzarti

The biologist was coming down the hillside. In all her glory and monstrosity.

A name was a dangerous luxury here.

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

You see tumbleweeds? You see cowpokes? Indians? This isn't the streets of Laredo.

The world is dark and quiet, except for the soft rustling of leaves and the cry of a a wolf in the distance.

I suspect the wilderness is a permanent home for me, which is both happy and hard.

The wilderness is where all the creatives and prophets and system-buckers and risk-takers have always lived, and it is stunningly vibrant. The walk out there is hard, but the authenticity out there is life.

The wolves in the woods have sharp teeth and long claws, but it's the wolf inside who will tear you apart.