Robert Macfarlane Quotes

• We are fallen mostly into pieces but the wild returns us to ourselves

  Robert Macfarlane

  Spiritual, Pieces, Return

  16 Copy quote

• Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Mountain, Half, Oblivion

  Robert Macfarlane (2004). “Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit”, Vintage Books

  48 Copy quote

• The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Writing, Stories, Literature

  Robert Macfarlane (2012). “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot”, p.26, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Fall, Magic, Landscape

  13 Copy quote

• Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that the streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac....I have lived in Cambridge on and off for a decade, and I imagine I will continue to do so for years to come. And for as long as I stay here, I know I will have to also get to the wild places.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Years, Cities, Wild Places

  22 Copy quote

• Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Animal, Journey, Snow

  10 Copy quote

• All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world's disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Wild Places, Perception, World

  Robert MacFarlane (2009). “Wild Places”, p.103, Granta Books

  11 Copy quote

• Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand

  Robert Macfarlane

  Feet, World, Lines

  8 Copy quote

• Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Knowing, Shepherds, Endless

  Robert Macfarlane (2012). “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot”, p.175, Penguin

  17 Copy quote

• I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Thinking, Eight, Tree

  Robert Macfarlane (2012). “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot”, p.210, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Men, Profound, Mountain

  Robert MacFarlane (2009). “Mountains Of The Mind”, p.275, Granta

  13 Copy quote

• Woods and forests have been essentialt to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Country, Memories, Unique

  Robert Macfarlane (2008). “The Wild Places”, p.69, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.

  Robert Macfarlane

  Running, Fall, Writing

  Robert Macfarlane (2012). “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot”, p.95, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

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