Anders Morley > Quotes

“That things don’t always go the way we expect them to is the end realization of every good story I know.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“Winter’s reason for being is to give things an opportunity to make themselves strong enough to resist its ability to kill them.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“When on clear cold days you are skiing across a vast expanse of white emptiness and the air seems perfectly still and you almost imagine there is nothing alive on earth except for you, you can sometimes hear wind currents tangling in the upper air. They moan or make soft howling noises, and in so desolate a place they seem to cry out to have meanings attached to them. But these writhing drafts have no meaning. The rest that one poet finds in falling snow is, for another, winter muffling its victims' screams with a pillow.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“I was fortunate to grow up in a place where snowfall was abundant, exclusion from private property was frowned upon, and outside my door were thousands of acres of forested hills to explore. By the time I was ten my feet were as big as my mother's, and I pinched her leather cross-country ski boots and a set of wooden skis and poles from Finland that had stood neglected in the cellar for years. I never had any instruction in Nordic skiing technique, but as soon as I pushed off it was obvious that this was an easier way to move about in the winter woods. To this day I have a hard time thinking of skiing as a sport and have felt self-conscious the few times I've skied in prepared tracks among the athletic and sleek-suited crowd that frequents Nordic centers. For me skiing is just the way you walk when there's snow on the ground. It's walking in cursive, and I love to walk.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“Movement is the creed of the northern winter, and until movement generates fire, it must be ceaseless.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“It had the comfortable ring of so much nonsense that happens to be true.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter

“Tradition, made practicable as various kinds of infrastructure, is what enables us to hold and not just reach and gives us something to fall back on when our exploration comes to nothing, as it sometimes will.”
― Anders Morley, This Land of Snow: A Journey Across the North in Winter