Quotes About Wilderness

Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness [...]

The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.

The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.

That Church according to Church is too brave, too cunning, and too good to be true is beside the point. America was destined to become a nation of self-fashioned and self-promoting men. What makes his story so special, I believe, is that he shows us how the nightmare of wilderness warfare might one day give rise to a society that promises liberty and justice for all.

It seemed that, after contact with a few human generations, sand hogs would begin to understand human speech. The irony was that after coming to understand their riders fully, the beasts often ended up abandoning them and heading off into the wilderness.

acorns and berries he can eat.

Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.

Run with the hunted.

I run with the hunted.

Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today's forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.

Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.

The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," wrote historian Stephen Pyne, "it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.

The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.

None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.

The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.

You don't need missionaries in Colorado; you got Colorado.

The north-west coast of America is that mixture of beauty and savagery, which I felt was very similar to the Dorset coast.

I try to keep Alaska fresh by doing laundry and bathing at least once a month.

I'm still blown away by how desolate Iceland can be, how deserted it is. It's very often like living on the moon.

The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: the towering summits, wild and lonely, full of joy and strangeness and their haunting premonitions of oncoming winter soar above him, the gulches, gorges, gaps, and wild ravines, fall sheer and suddenly away with a dizzy terrifying steepness, and all the time the great train toils slowly down from the mountain summits with the sinuous turnings of an enormous snake.

We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.

Few landscapes have been so deeply known. And fewer still have been so lightly inhabited.

I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.