Landscape Quotes - Page 27

• When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!

  Susanna Clarke

  Light, Scotland, Rose

  Susanna Clarke, Portia Rosenberg (2005). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.604, A&C Black

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• Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

  Freeman Dyson

  Dream, Fiction, Territory

  Freeman Dyson (1999). “Imagined World”, p.9, Universities Press

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• The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

  Wilfred Owen

  Night, Sight, Broken

  Wilfred Owen (1965). “The Collected poems of Wilfred Owen”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• It's funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated worldwide as perhaps man's greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon's desolate landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

  Jon Stewart

  Mother, Moon, Men

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• It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.

  Franny Billingsley

  Moving, Eye, Ideas

  Franny Billingsley (2001). “The Folk Keeper”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.

  Tom Robbins

  Weather, Tea, Quality

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates”, p.145, Bantam

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• God never made an ugly landscape. All that sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.

  John Muir

  Beautiful, Shine On, Long

  John Muir, Peter Browning (1988). “John Muir, in His Own Words: A Book of Quotations”, p.58, Great West Books

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• In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Eye, Men, Rocks

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West”, p.258, Vintage

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• I'll sue!" Ian sputtered. "I'll sue you AND the dog. And the country of South Korea. And...and..." "The landscape architect?" Natalie asked. "The landscape architect!" Ian shouted.

  Peter Lerangis

  Country, Dog, Korea

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• ...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.

  Jasper Fforde

  Lord, Form, Stunning

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• The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Beach, Color, Sky

  FaceBook post by Jhumpa Lahiri from Oct 29, 2012

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• Then followed that beautiful season... Summer.... Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Beautiful, Summer, June

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1988). “Selected Poems”, p.31, Penguin

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• New York has a thousand universes in it that don't always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't.

  Jay-Z

  New York, Wall, Writing

  Jay-Z (2010). “Decoded (Enhanced Edition)”, p.108, Random House Group

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• There is a special charm to journeys undertaken before daybreak in hot lands: the air is soft and cool and the coming of dawn reveals a landscape fresh from the night dew.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Night, Journey, Air

  Aung San Suu Kyi (1997). “Letters From Burma:”

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• Feelings of longing seemed to burst from her heart; they ran in all directions, like streams of blood, seeking out paths to all the places in the wide landscape where she had lived, to all her sons roaming through the world, to all her dead lying under the earth.

  Sigrid Undset

  Lying, Heart, Son

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• We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.

  Neil Gaiman

  Growing Up, Kindness, Lying

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• I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Lonely, Memories, Men

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• If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.

  Hayao Miyazaki

  Jobs, Moving, Artist

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Girl, Mirrors, Light

  "Snow Country". Book by Yasunari Kawabata, 1948.

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• Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

  Nicole Krauss

  Giving Up, Sacrifice, Sky

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• The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hope, Hurt, Regret

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Perfect, Movement

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.12, Counterpoint

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• The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Moving, Risk

  "The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road". Book by Paul Theroux, May 19, 2011.

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• Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.

  Paulo Coelho

  Moving, Journey, People

  Paulo Coelho (2011). “Aleph”, p.11, HarperCollins UK

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• The horse seemed to bend time and space as he ran, blurring the landscape and making Frank feel like he'd just drunk a gallon of whole milk without his lactose-intolerance medicine: "Seven hundred and fifty miles per hour. Eight hundred. Eight hundred and three. Fast. very Fast.

  Rick Riordan

  Horse, Eight, Medicine

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