Stephen Alter > Quotes

“I study her visage, the fluted snow fields and couloirs of ice scoured by avalanches. Horizontal bands of rock curve downward, as if bearing the weight of the sky. Her summit is like a fulcrum on which the heavens lean, balancing the setting sun and rising moon.”
― Stephen Alter, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime

“Our insistence on being different from everything around us is one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. We stubbornly maintain an illusory distinction that sets us apart from rock and ice, water and fire, plant and animal. Both religion and rationality try to explain it through an elaborate vocabulary of separation—soul, atman, spirit, ghosts in the machine or simply the idea of selfhood. We have dreamed up gods so that we can reassure ourselves that somewhere, someday, somehow, after this life is over, something awaits us: a presence that recognizes who we are. But if we approach a mountain instead, accepting that we are nothing more or less than an integral part of its existence, our ego merges with the nature of the mountain. In”
― Stephen Alter, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime

“Humanity is a deceptive noun that suggests our best qualities as a species, though it often masks prejudice and inequity.”
― Stephen Alter, In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett

“But as the British Empire pulled up its tent pegs and struck camp to head home, I realized that there would be anger and resentment towards my race. The white man has given India many things of great value but he has also taken far more than his share and, in many cases, imposed unjust prejudices and priorities on people who have lived under the yoke of foreign domination for nearly a century and a half. Whatever reprisals occur might not take the extreme forms of violence that erupted in 1857, when my grandfather and other family members were slaughtered during the Mutiny. Nevertheless, if politics spills into the streets it is a scourge that turns friends into adversaries, reducing human behaviour to a brute contest in which all rules are abandoned and there can be no victor, only the vanquished. Some journalists have described it as the ‘law of the jungle’, which is an odious comparison, for in the absence of man, most jungles exist in peaceful harmony, governed by laws of nature and the eternal, equitable balance between life and death.”
― Stephen Alter, In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett

“In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature, Dr Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia discovered communication networks in stands of Douglas firs, which she dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’, suggesting the connectivity of trees. This research has been popularized by German naturalist Peter Wohlleben in his bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. He describes how oaks and beeches share information using microscopic fungal filaments, comparing these to fibre-optic Internet cables. ‘One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae”. Over centuries a single fungus can cover many square kilometres and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping them exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.”
― Stephen Alter, Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth

“It isn’t reason or religion that makes us a successful species, or the literature we read in school, or the patriotic discipline and dedication with which we defend our nation’s interests. Instead, it is the primitive impulses we follow, which have been with us from our earliest incarnations. Whatever we may have become, Homo sapiens were once nothing more than lonely hunters with no sense of right or wrong but only a feeling inside our marrow that somehow we must carry on. In that simple equation lies our sole claim to nobility and virtue. The survival of our species is the only moral choice we face.”
― Stephen Alter, In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett

“If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Stephen Alter, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime

“He likes to quote the Sufi poet Rumi: ‘Travel leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller’, an aphorism also attributed to the Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta.”
― Stephen Alter, Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth