Stephen Trimble > Quotes

“A Lakota woman . . . once wrote that what lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different.
In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadow, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life [Barry Lopez].”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing

“What one thinks of any region, while traveling through, is the result of at least three things: what one knows, what one imagines, and how one is disposed [Barry Lopez].”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing

“Stefansson was once asked by an Eskimo to whom he was showing a pair of binoculars for the first time whether he could 'see into tomorrow' with them. . . . What the Inuk probably meant was, Are those things powerful enough to see something that will not reach you for another day. . . . which you yourself will not reach for another day [Barry Lopez]?”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing

“Thoreau was our suburban coyote [Edward Abbey].”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing

“If a pitch pine found Cape Cod to its liking, or a white pine was such an ancient believer in New Hampshire . . . then we ought to be consulting them about home territory [John Hays, "Homing"].”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing

“We are belabored by the insistence on the part of our politicians, businessmen and military leaders, and the claque of scriveners who serve them, that 'growth' and 'power' are intrinsic goods, of which we can never have enough, or even too much. As if gigantism were an end in itself. As if a commendable rat were a rat twelve hands high at the shoulders — and still growing. As if we could never have peace on this planet until one state dominates all others [Edward Abbey].”
― Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters With Natural History Writing