Paul Kingsnorth Quotes

#1. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.

Paul Kingsnorth

#2. "Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

Paul Kingsnorth

#3. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.

Paul Kingsnorth

#4. In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

Paul Kingsnorth

#5. Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

Paul Kingsnorth

#6. We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.

Paul Kingsnorth

#7. I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

Paul Kingsnorth

#8. I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066.

Paul Kingsnorth

#9. A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.

Paul Kingsnorth

#10. It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

Paul Kingsnorth

#11. We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

Paul Kingsnorth

#12. I'm increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

Paul Kingsnorth

#13. Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

Paul Kingsnorth

#14. Today, the real England sometimes feels like 50 million people driving around a motorway forever.

Paul Kingsnorth

#15. The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

Paul Kingsnorth