“ We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even… Wendell Berry
“ Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binocular… Barry Lopez
“ I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of con… Barry Lopez
“ I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but a… Barry Lopez
“ Every day is an opportunity to stand in awe when witnessing the overpowering presence of nature, an apt time to pay reverence for the inestimable beauty of life. I must remain mindful to live in an et… Kilroy J. Oldster
“ And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself. Frédéric Gros
“ In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lo… Frédéric Gros
“ Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role,… Frédéric Gros
“ Forest paths – flat labyrinths – and gentle plains invite the walker’s body to softness, to languor. And memories arise like eddying mists. The air is more bracing with Nietzsche, and above all sharp,… Frédéric Gros
“ When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s… Frédéric Gros
“ Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, witho… Frédéric Gros
“ You lift your head, you’re on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That’s it, that’s all, and you’re there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there. Frédéric Gros
“ Thoreau: ‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.’ That is why walking leads to a total… Frédéric Gros
“ But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at… Frédéric Gros
“ But just a vibration among the trees and stones, on the paths. Walking to breathe in the landscape. Every step an inspiration born to die immediately, well beyond the oeuvre. I like to walk at my ease… Frédéric Gros
“ Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You adv… Frédéric Gros
“ When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the… Frédéric Gros
“ Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an energy that is deftly deployed, it is a free affirm… Frédéric Gros
“ The joy of walking and feeling the body advancing ‘like a man alone’; the fullness of feeling alive. And then happiness, before the spectacle of a violet-shadowed valley below the beams of the setting… Frédéric Gros
