216 Quotes About Walks

The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation; and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.

You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).

There are walks of pain—the pacing-around-your-house-lonesome-heartbreak kind. There are walks of joy—leaping and bold, ecstatic with good news. There are walks of new beginnings—the first steps of a child or a young woman learning to become like a child again.And there are hornets’ nests of walks that sting you with living terror.

Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints…

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.

Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.

You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.

When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world’s door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.

And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.