Top 17 Nan Shepherd Quotes
#2. These tracks give to winter hill walking a distinctive pleasure. One is companioned, though not in time.
Nan Shepherd
#3. Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall, even while watching sky and land.
Nan Shepherd
#4. To Martha it seemed that she stood outside life. The world went by her, colourless shapes on a flat pale background. Nothing had solidity or warmth. She felt numb, as though she could never be passionately alive again.
Nan Shepherd
#5. It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights.
Nan Shepherd
#6. It is worth ascending unexiting heights if for nothing else than to see the big ones from nearer their own level.
Nan Shepherd
#7. In September dawns I hardly breathe - I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there, and I in it.
Nan Shepherd
#8. Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.
Nan Shepherd
#9. The more one learns of this intricate interplay of soil, altitude, weather, and the living tissues of plant and insect (an intricacy that has its astonishing moments, as when sundew and butterwort eat the insects), the more the mystery deepens. Knowledge does not dispel mystery.
Nan Shepherd
#10. Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.
Nan Shepherd
#11. Am I such a slave as that? Dependent on a man to complete me! I thought I couldn't be anything without him- I can be my own creator!
Nan Shepherd
#12. What he values is a task that, demanding of him all he has and is, absorbs and so releases him entirely.
Nan Shepherd
#13. So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.
Nan Shepherd
#14. Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth. And a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment.
Nan Shepherd
#15. Walking in mist tests not only individual self-discipline, but the best sort of interplay between persons.
Nan Shepherd
#16. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.
Nan Shepherd
#17. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering. I draw life in through the delicate hairs of my nostrils.
Nan Shepherd
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