Robert Macfarlane Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.

What we bloodlessy call 'place' is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always 'in', never 'on'.

Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.

a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

For pilgrims walking...every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.