Quotes About Landscape

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine.

And it was much later, too, that I realised these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness.

I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.

White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations.

Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air.

But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill.

Sacramento, capital of California, and went sailing along over the Great Valley.

William Blackstone had laid out a farm and orchard, and built him a house on the western slope of one of the hills, whence he could see the sun set across the windings of the river Charles, and over the wide brown marshes through which it made its way.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Topographically the country is magnificent -- and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

Across that midnight landscape he rides with his toppling burden of despair and hope, bearing with him the beast's face and the dream, but unable to cast off either or to believe in either. For he is man, the changeling, in whom the sense of goodness has not perished, nor an eye for some supernatural guidepost in the night.

Mindfulness was a buzz-word in 2012 – took on steam by the time I was born. Mum said it was our last attempt to claim an emotional landscape before the undeniable march of apathy, the lack of any profound connection, the dullness.

We have little control over the outer weather patterns as we make our way through the landscape of a life. But we can become masters of the inner landscape. We can use what happens on the outside to change the way we function on the inside.

From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then -- we went on dancing.

Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes: a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.

I had been working nonstop for two years and needed a break. Instead of flying or booking myself at the usual holiday spots, we decided to drive across south India. The only thing that changes in the landscape are the posters of film stars and politicians.

The San Gabriel monument expands our natural heritage, but there is more in need of safeguarding - extraordinary places like Utah's Greater Canyonlands.

In Utah, there are no bad things in the water there. It's just smooth, really beautiful.