5 Quotes by Robert Macfarlane about wilderness


  • Author Robert Macfarlane
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    I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.

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  • Author Robert Macfarlane
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    I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.

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  • Author Robert Macfarlane
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    As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. (Quoted from Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping, 1923)

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  • Author Robert Macfarlane
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    His only solace came in following the peregrines. Hunting as haunting. Out in the fields, he was brought closer to wildness: he could step through the looking-glass and into the beyond-world. Out there, he was also able to forget the fact that he himself was ill.

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