#wilderness

Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious. ↗

— Peter Heller

#outdoors #risk #wilderness #freedom

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#god #wilderness #love

I own a crevice stuffed with moss and a couch of lemming fur; I sit and listen to the music of water dripping on a distant stone. Or I sing to myself of stealth and loneliness No one comes to see me but I hear outside the scratching of claws, the warm, inquisitive breath … (from 'The Hermitage') ↗

— John Meade Haines

#wilderness #music

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#nature #wilderness #nature

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. ↗

— Alan Alda

#city #comfort #creative #else #ever

Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness. ↗

— Kate DiCamillo

#books #every #guides #light #me

I'm 40 next year and I'm very well aware that where I am now, it becomes a bit of a wilderness for actresses. ↗

— Lena Headey

#aware #becomes #bit #i #i am

The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a wilderness, of which the government had never taken possession, and of which it could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession. ↗

— William H. Wharton

#could #ever #government #granted #had

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. ↗

— Bill McKibben

#nature #trees #wilderness #woods #imagination

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness. ↗

— Steve Martin

#believe #country #i #i believe #i believe that