The Wild Quotes

“...I love dandelions. They make me feel like sunshine itself, and you will always see some creature resting on an open bloom, if you have a little patience to wait. This vital source for all emerging pollinators is a blast of uplifting yellow to brighten even the greyest of days. It stands tall and proud, unlike all the others opening and swaying in the breeze. The odd one out.”
― Dara McAnulty, Diary of a Young Naturalist

“I fucking love you more than words can describe. It isn't a feeling - it's like a storm that crashes into me and obliterates me. I can't stop it. I wasn't prepared for it. I just know that it's the best thing and the scariest thing to ever happen to me.”
― K Webster

“I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
(Quoted from Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping, 1923)”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. 'I want all my friends to come up like weeds,' he had once written in a notebook, 'and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.' That caught it exactly. Spontaneous and unstoppable. Roger had not just loved the wild, he had been the wild. Not in the austere and chastening sense I had once understood the wild to be, but natural, vigorous, like a tree or a river.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“His only solace came in following the peregrines. Hunting as haunting. Out in the fields, he was brought closer to wildness: he could step through the looking-glass and into the beyond-world. Out there, he was also able to forget the fact that he himself was ill.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“My attraction to wild places is, in part, an attempt to relive the innocence and imagination lost after youth. To be submersed in the innocence of a forest, the ungoverned landscape, to exist by my own laws and no one else’s, even if only briefly — this is one of the primary beacons that guides me back into wild places.”
― Daniel J. Rice, THE UNPEOPLED SEASON: A Journal of Solitude and Wilderness

“We grow up learning norms and behaviors that are deemed acceptable. Yet when all of life's easiness is stripped from us, and we're thrust into something arduous, those norms get forgotten. They get shoved to the side as instinct guides the way. The mind is no longer needed. A useless organ. It's the heart that grows wild.”
― K Webster