Robert Macfarlane Quotes

#1. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places make of us ...

Robert Macfarlane

#2. It felt at that moment unarguable that a horizon line might exert as potent or pull upon the mind as a mountain's summit.

Robert Macfarlane

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

Robert Macfarlane

#4. Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write;

Robert Macfarlane

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

Robert Macfarlane

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

Robert Macfarlane

#7. 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.

Robert Macfarlane

#8. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

Robert Macfarlane

#9. The instinct and the body (the felt smoothness of pebbles, the seen grain of light) must know in ways that the conscious mind cannot.

Robert Macfarlane

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

Robert Macfarlane

#11. Felt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too upon the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought.

Robert Macfarlane

#12. These words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers;

Robert Macfarlane

#13. We don't come fresh to even the most inaccessible of landscapes.
...
We carry expectations and to an extent make what we meet conform to those expectations.
p 195

Robert Macfarlane

#14. But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring.

Robert Macfarlane

#15. 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

#16. I felt a sensation of candour and amplitude, of the body and mind opened up, of thought diffusing at the body's edges rather than ending at the skin.

Robert Macfarlane

#17. Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.

Robert Macfarlane

#18. Looking from afar - from present to past, from exile to homeland, from island back to mainland, mountain-top at lowland - results notin vision's diffusion but in its sharpening; not in memory's dispersal but in it's plenishment.

Robert Macfarlane

#19. Perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.

Robert Macfarlane

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

Robert Macfarlane

#21. Although we have our compendia of flora, fauna, birds, reptiles and insects, we lack a Terra Britannica, as it were: a gathering of terms for the land and its specificities

Robert Macfarlane

#22. 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.

Robert Macfarlane

#23. Landscape ... can 'enlarge the imagined range for self to move in.

Robert Macfarlane

#24. Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.

Robert Macfarlane

#25. 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

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

Robert Macfarlane

#27. The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.

Robert Macfarlane

#28. He suggested that paths were imprinted with the 'dreams' of each traveler who had walked it and that his own experiences would in course of time [also] lie under men's feet.

Robert Macfarlane

#29. The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo's cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.

Robert Macfarlane

#30. Kimmeridge (n.): The light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing';

Robert Macfarlane

#31. A life lived as variously as Roger's, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves.

Robert Macfarlane

#32. 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'.

Robert Macfarlane

#33. Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making.

Robert Macfarlane