Wild Quotes

“If Springtime crawls out of the

wild mouths of flowers, then
surely, Winter crawls out of mine.”
― Cecilia Llompart, The Wingless

“... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.”
― Rob Schultheis, Fool's Gold: Lives, Loves, and Misadventures in the Four Corners Country

“At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.”
― Diane Ackerman, The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

“That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Flush

“Do you want to live, Sander?”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“Look around! Look what we’ve done to the world. We fucked everything up. In a few years it’s going to be unlivable. We don’t deserve to be stewards of this planet. And that pales to the things we do to each other. We’re monsters, Sander, and someone needs to end it.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sixth Borough

“Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.”
― Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl

“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Thou strange piece of wild nature!”
― Colley Cibber

“Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst.”
― George Farquhar

“Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion.
All of it was on display in the garden of captives.”
― Thomas French, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives

“Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests—even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild.”
― Thomas French, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives

“The closest natural area to you is the wild, naturally intelligent biological community within you.”
― Michael J. Cohen, The World Peace University Field Guide to Connecting With Nature

“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that's what I think. It's not that it's soothing or restful, because it's not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don't know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I'm not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn't notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can't actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That's all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.

Just the bush.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collected gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgement.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“This isn't about strength, " said Pat. "And you may not be able to see this yet, but perhaps there will come a time—it could be years from now—when you'll need to get on your horse and ride into battle and you're going to hesitate. You're going to falter. To heal the wound your father made, you're going to have to get on that horse and ride into battle like a warrior.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Gods,” she said fervently into his neck. “I love this.”
“Even with the rain, and in a garden shed…”
“Yes, honestly, I love it. I feel…wild. Doing this in here, with you.”
“Wild. Huh. You make me feel domesticated.” When she laughed at the word, he clarified, “Safe.” He cupped her cheek. “Cared for.”
― Molly Ringle, Ballad for Jasmine Town

“Coorie camping is about leaving your expensive devices at home and feeling like a wildling for the weekend.
It's about taking turns to fetch water, boiling it and doling out cups of tea.
What feels like a chore at home becomes fun on a camping trip.
Decorate your tent with forest treasures until it looks like a woodland grotto and share memory games played in childhood with adult friends.
There is also the chance to get really good at making campfires.
Fire is our oldest and most ensuring form of heat and energy.
Is it any wonder it's so important to our coorie experience?”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“You do not need to walk in the wilderness to make contact with the wild. If you know your stories--if you understand the mythologies of your land--then you can leap from a sunlit stroll with your dog into the ancient, chthonic wood.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“People who live wholly urbanized lives, spending little time outdoors and rarely stopping to notice life that is not human-made, suffer emotionally and spiritually, cut off, as they are, from our souls' well-spring. We need more than the flat world born of our synthetically directed thoughts - our walls and cubicles, television and computer screens. We need to feed out senses with sunshine and wind, night and rain, hills, trees, and flowing water. We must nurture what master tracker and nature photographer Paul Rezendes calls the 'wild within, the larger sense of who we are...the whole of the conscious universe.”
― Donna Seaman

“Wild Fremen said it well:"Four things cannot be hidden - love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Told ya. Lobsterfest is wild.
The Catch”
― Amy Lea, The Catch

“My lens bridges the gap between human and wild. It allows me to speak nature's language.”
― Biju Karakkonam, Nature and Wildlife Photographer

“Through the lens, I enter a dialogue with the wild. Nature reveals its purest essence.”
― Biju Karakkonam, Nature and Wildlife Photographer

“In the pages of a book, you can find the universe within a single heartbeat.”
― Umesha Chathurangi Handapangoda, Jungle Heroes Leo and Panther - Adventures in the Wild

“Hey what's up with all the glum pusses” Mr. Wallner asked, looking at each of them. “Come on gang, how can I get my harem in an up mood?”
― R.L. Stine, The Stepsister

“Out in the wilderness, nature is your translator.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“anmarke.art
01/31/2024
If we could appreciate the unassuming beauty of snowdrops and the rhythmic devotion of nature, perhaps we would find a deeper, more fulfilling way to exist—one where the magic of the world around us becomes the true currency of our happiness.”
― An Marke

“Our bonfire burns brightly,
alighting our hot harvest.
Scarce seeds of winter's heat,
as its first dawn inflames.
Sprouting into a plant
that roots within my soul.
[Winter Solstice's Secret]”
― Susan L. Marshall, Wild Soul: Contemporary Classical Winter Poetry