outdoors quotes

[alene]

"what makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well"--from The Little Prince, I would add, it hides a well or a slot canyon : )

 

[alene]

another favorite quote from Kahlil Gibran's, The Prophet: "And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

 

[Nick]

“Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

-Edward Abbey

 

[IntrepidXJ]

"There are two easy ways to die in the desert - thirst and drowning."

-Craig Childs

 

[IntrepidXJ]

“How could a place defined by the absence of water be defined by the presence of it?”

-Craig Childs

 

[Don]

"In the desert, especially at night, you encounter the dangers of hard thinking." -Frank Herbert



(Don't remember which Dune book that's from.)

 

[HomerJ]

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name.
It felt good to be out of the rain.
In the desert you can remember your name.
Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."

- America

 

[alene]

from an Outside magazine article I read this morning: "States do not get prettier than Montana. Driving across it is like being trapped in a beer commercial wrapped in the National Anthem." A little home-state pride for me, I thought that was a great description!

 

[Nick]

I changed the name of the thread to 'outdoors quotes'. Why limit it to the desert?

"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."

-Robert Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

 

[alene]

from "all the pretty horses"

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

 

[leatherman]

"The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark"
-John Muir

 

[blueeyes]

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” -
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

 

[Christian]

"To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

[Seldom Seen Anderson]

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look at my works, ye Mighty and despair!"
Nothing beside remainsl Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley


Ozy comes from the Greek "ozium," which means to breath, or air. Mandias comes from the Greek "mandate," which means to rule. Hence, Ozymandias is simply a "ruler of air" or a "ruler of nothing". It is then obvious that the King of Kings spoken of in the poem is actually nature itself. Nature never disappears and nature represents immortality.
http://chelm.freeyellow.com/ozymandias1.html

 

[ABN]

"Life has come to a standstill, at least for the hour, In this forgotten place. The tree and i wait on the shore of time, temporarily free..."


“Into the sweet air and the smell of yellow pine, into the grasslands among the ancient cinder cones, into the freedom of the open range. Good God but it’s a relief to escape, if only for an hour, the squalid ant hills, big or little, Show Low or Shanghai of twentieth century man….
A world without open country would be a universal jail.”

-Edward Abbey

 

[Dave]

I've been reading Stegner's "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian", in which he quotes Clarence Dutton (I believe from "Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah"). Speaking specifically of Utah's plateau province:

The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would at first seem only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry and bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent. But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and even majesty; that colors which had been esteemed unrefined, immodest, and glaring, are as expressive, tender, changeful, and capacious of effects as any others. Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated before they can be understood.

 

[Aldaron]

"To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature

 

[Aldaron]

"The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough." Emerson Nature

Dang it...I hope it's not too obvious with these quotes what I majored in...

 

[jimheino]

"The lone hiker has no social difficulties at all, except the possibility of discovering, while talking to himself, that he's a bore." - Harvey Manning

 

[Aldaron]

I meant to post this one in the fall:

"He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams." J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring