Quotes About Wilderness

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.

I'm a totally desert person.

I'm really an outdoorsy girl. People think I can't go anywhere without getting all primped up, but I love to go camping, and I'm totally fine with not doing my hair or makeup, not taking a shower and just hiking.

The knives opened the flesh like they were painting paintings of a new country, sheer plains of dark land, with the red rivers bursting their banks everywhere, till we were sloshing in God knows what and the dry earth was suddenly turned to noisy mud. The Shawnees ate the lights raw. Their mouths were sinkholes of dark blood.

Ty sådana fålar finna livet svårt, som inte tåla sporre eller piska. Vid varje smärta, som övergår dem, skena de åstad på vilda vägar mot gapande avgrunder. Så snart vägen är stenig och färden bekymmersam, veta de ingen annan råd än att välta lasset och fara åstad i galenskap.

He was a cowboy with the soul of a poet. To this day, he is the most American American I've ever met.

Lord, you call us out of captivity into the freedom of your beloved community. As we pass through the wilderness spaces of our lives, grant us ears to hear you, eyes to see you, and hearts that ache for you, that we might not turn away from the brothers and sisters who help us remember who we are. Amen.

I found out some really cool ways to swing around the Winchester.

Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...

That's nothing. To impress a polar bear I met in Switzerland, I once got on two tiny sticks and flew down a snow-covered mountain.

Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land,... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.

What a glorious time they must have in that wilderness, far from mankind and election day!

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

Time flies when you grow fangs and fur.

Wolves together stand howling soft and loud at light, singing family songs.

Truly I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild and want it back. So if someday you can't find me you might look into that tree or—of course it's possible—under it.

Extending the Airport Runway The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them.

Until I came and saw the water falling, its lace legs and its womanly arms sheeting down, while something howled like thunder, over the rocks, all day and all night - unspooling.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.

All important ideas must include the trees,the mountains, and the rivers.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Miles below in the cold woods, with the mouse and the owl, with the clearness of water sheeted and hidden, with the reason for the wind forever a secret, he descends and sits with me, his voice like the snapping of bones.