Hiking Trail Quotes

#1. The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail - the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer - but it will always be the first and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.

Bill Bryson

#2. The long distance hiker, a breed set apart,
From the likes of the usual pack.
He'll shoulder his gear, be hittin' the trail;
Long gone, long 'fore he'll be back.

M.J. Eberhart

#3. I did get upset once, when we were hiking between pitches 15 and 16. Two women and a dog were trying to find their way down through the maze of trails below the First Summit and they asked us: 'Are you on the trail?' I let my indignity show: 'NO, we're on a CLIMB!'

Andy Cairns

#4. Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#5. Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching." - From an ancient Assyrian tablet.

Sidney Homer

#6. I would rather miss the mark acting well than win the day acting basely.

Sophocles

#7. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.

Jacqueline Woodson

#8. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

Cheryl Strayed

#9. Hiking a ridge, a meadow, or a river bottom, is as healthy a form of exercise as one can get. Hiking seems to put all the body cells back into rhythm. Ten to twenty miles on a trail puts one to bed with his cares unraveled.

William O. Douglas

#10. Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country's Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be.

Aspen Matis

#11. I wake, the lump of last night
hiking a trail through my throat.

[from "Those Who Love Raptors"]

Alina Stefanescu

#12. As writers, we must keep throwing problems at our characters. Conflict is the heart of good storytelling. Hiking in nature along a twisting trail can remind us what a good story feels like. It's the opposite of a treadmill - or an interstate highway.

Kate Klise

#13. A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

Bill Bryson

#14. No, we don't feel anything. We consciously pass through the door we have to enter, and the fact we have to enter it is enough to put us to sleep.

Fernando Pessoa

#15. No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

D.H. Lawrence

#16. I was no longer following a trail.

I was learning to follow myself.

Aspen Matis

#17. The place where you lose the trail is not necessarily the place where it ends.

Tom Brown Jr.

#18. I didn't know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

Aspen Matis

#19. Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.

Aspen Matis

#20. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.

Bill Bryson

#21. There was a loud burst of laughter somewhere in the campground and Maggie looked around. A man wearing a backpack but no clothes was coming down the trail. He had excellent hiking boots on his feet, a straw hat on his head and that was all. His thing was swaying in the breeze.

Robyn Carr

#22. but a man did not acquire so much gold brocade without learning to swallow his own desire

Gordon Dahlquist

#23. In Massachusetts and Vermont, there had been plenty of mosquitoes, but in New Hampshire, they had reinforcements.

Jennifer Pharr Davis

#24. Not only is New York City the nation's melting pot, it is also the casserole, the chafing dish and the charcoal grill.

John Lindsay

#25. Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail very few or even no people ever went before, it takes courage and emotional maturity.

Pearl Zhu

#26. A marriage is no amusement but a solemn act, and generally a sad one.

Queen Victoria

#27. My motivation to keep hiking was rooted in the magnificent details of the Appalachian Mountains, and the more I poured myself out - the more energy I gave the trail - the more it gave me in return.

Jennifer Pharr Davis

#28. Hiking is like life...
You can spend the whole trip just watching the trail ahead, worrying that you'll twist an ankle or fall.
And then you miss all this.

Susannah Scott