368 Quotes About Wilderness

The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.

That’s what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating.

They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in the water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell.

I was disoriented by the idea that men should ever leave the forest.

I— I am no’ deservin’ of such kindness. I am tainted, do you no’ see that?” “All I see, Bethie, is the woman I—” Love. “— care deeply about and wish to protect.” The word had come to him so naturally, had slipped onto his tongue as if he’d meant it. And to his astonishment, Nicholas realized he did. He loved her.He was in love with Bethie Stewart.

Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel…he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he. All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him.

Life in the wild, as I’m observing, is about survival as much as pleasure.