Quotes About Wilderness

The thing I heard howling in the woods. It was no Coyote.

You can take the man out of the woods, but you can't take the woods out of the man.

Brian looked back and for a moment felt afraid because the wolf was so... so right. He knew Brian, knew him and owned him and chose not to do anything to him. But the fear moved then, moved away,and Brian knew the wolf for what it was - another part of the woods, another part of all of it.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.

Enkidu never should've killed the guardian of the forest. He should've joined him. That's what too much civilizing does to you.

A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834).

She called to them: the cicadas , the moths, the beetles, and fireflies, the little gnats and mosquitos, the thousands and thousands of little mosquitos. And they responded, their tiny voices swelling, coming together like a song, filling the woods with their melody as they flew to her, swarming and swirling together like a growing storm cloud.

The towering trees grew ever denser as she went, leaning in on her from either side, blocking out the sun—a twisted tunnel of branches and leaves and gnarled roots that felt ready to swallow her at any moment.

This nation was built by men who took risks — pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.

In the deep forests of Mount Rainier, the sun doesn't rise, it leaks in thin bands through the trees.

His legs withered. His stomach stretched taut as a drum. His skin erupted in watery pustules: whichever way he turned was agony. Phosphorescent centipedes crawled over him at night; and the vultures spattered him with ammoniac droppings, shuffling for position along the wall, and flexing their pinions with the noise of tearing silk.

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.

Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri.And as Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.

A quick wrassle with a bear.

Only in the late eighteenth century, with Burke and his theory of the sublime, Wordsworth and his mountains, Rousseau and his thoughts on Nature, did any sense of the romantic appeal of such wilderness areas begin in Europe. But having discovered such a sensibility ourselves, there has always been a reluctance to ascribe it to any other culture, let alone one which might have come to it before us.

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.

The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is bat country!

The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story.

I feel a powerful lust for red salmon. I agreed.