Conor Knighton > Quotes

“If nature has a soul, it feels like it must be bound up in the bark and sap of our forests. There, older, wiser sentinels stand in silent judgment. Not just the ancient sequoias and redwoods—even regular pine and birch trees outlast us. Every tree is a witness tree—they see how we spend our time on earth, what we take and what we give.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“It occurred to me that part of the reason I’d seen so much debate about the year’s first sunrise, and not its last sunset, was that our beginnings always seem more important than our endings. In life, we can often control how things start. Endings are elusive and amorphous and uncertain.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“I wanted a national park kind of love. Something that felt different and special compared to everything else surrounding it. Some thing that was fun and inspiring. Some thing that felt like it was worth guarding and protecting forever.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Recently, we've started to think more about how the bright lights from our screens are affecting our bodies. But I wonder how the lights from our cities might be affecting our souls. As people, we arrived on the planet with a "dark mode" pre-installed, but for the past century, we've been turning it off. In an effort to see our own world more clearly, we have obscured our view of the other worlds and—quite possibly—of the divine.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Our ability to see a value in preserving life that extends beyond our immediate self-interest may be what makes us most human.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective,” he wrote. “It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Humans are by far the most destructive species, but we're also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don't go extinct. [...] Our ability to see a value in preserving life that extends beyond our immediate self-interest may be what makes us most human.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“no longer think there’s one specific path that leads to enlightenment or salvation. I don’t think Muir did, either. Except, perhaps, for the path of the trail itself. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he once wrote. I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“When advocating for the sequoias, Muir once wrote, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“...tell me again about how you used to watch movies in a car. It sounded so cool to me. And so, on one of the last nights of that summer, my parents decided to re-create a drive-in movie in our driveway.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Like that stolen wood at Petrified Forest, once a piece of you has been taken, it can’t be put back.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Former Park Service director Jon Jarvis has said that climate change is “fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“To know that there was beauty all around me, even if I couldn’t see it.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place,” he wrote. “Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“In the national parks, all are just Americans.” Visit a park, he says, and “Perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America—and loves it.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“The conservation of all that lives within the park, Truman argued, was necessary “for the conservation of the human spirit.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“At the park’s dedication ceremony, President Harry Truman promised the crowd that “in this park we shall preserve tarpon and trout, pompano, bear, deer, crocodiles and alligators—and rare birds of great beauty. We shall protect hundreds of all kinds of wildlife which might otherwise soon be extinct.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“The etchings must have had some spiritual significance. Whatever afterlife the Fremont may have believed in, in that moment they came back to life for me.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Even though the tall redwoods are constantly at risk of toppling over, they rarely do, thanks to a little help from their friends. The trees lock their roots together under the soil and hold each other tight. That may be their most human quality of all. Like us, the trees are stronger together than they are on their own.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“There’s a well-known John Muir quote—“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Quiet can be difficult to quantify—it's easier to think of loud in relative terms. A rock concert is louder than a string quartet; a jet engine is louder than a car engine; a couple have sex on the other side of the hotel wall last night was louder than my TV, so I made my TV louder.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Shelton Johnson may just be the best park ranger who ever lived.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Never as well planned or resource-conscious as the trails planned by the park, social trails are created when hikers, frustrated with crowds on the main path, find their own way. Unfortunately, in the process, they trample vegetation and damage the fragile soil. Bryce Canyon, a park created by erosion over millions of years, is very vulnerable to the type of erosion caused by a summer of people walking where they shouldn’t.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer give strength to body and soul alike,” Muir wrote in The Yosemite.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“Black Canyon is often far deeper than it is wide—it’s a sheer drop down to the bottom.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“In the history of the Endangered Species Act, less than 2 percent of all species that have ever been listed have been delisted.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“We need places such as Everglades National Park where we may be more keenly aware of our Creator’s infinitely varied, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely bountiful handiwork,” Truman said”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“On any given night, the same constellations, planets, and galaxies pass over all three places. The sky is what links us together. It’s a concept I first learned from the renowned animated astronomer Fievel Mousekewitz.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park

“All I knew was that, whenever it came time to stop wandering, I wanted a national park kind of love. Something that felt different and special compared with everything else surrounding it. Something that was fun and inspiring. Something that felt like it was worth guarding and protecting forever.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park