Best 372 quotes in «landscape quotes» category

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape.

What I take from writers I like is their economy - the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes.

We have little control over the outer weather patterns as we make our way through the landscape of a life. But we can become masters of the inner landscape. We can use what happens on the outside to change the way we function on the inside.

Welcome to Israel, where the beaches are great, the fruit is succulent, the landscape is mesmerizing, and all of it is stolen.

We must also recognize the new realities of modern warfare and the modern landscape of a battlefield.

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.

What we can do as landscape architects is look at how we can use materials to the best advantage, and our resources like water. Water is so precious that we can't waste it, we have to use it in small amounts, and we have to use it effectively.

When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.

When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.

When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

Works of art are landscapes of the mind.

When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel.

While it is emotion that gives an impulse to the landscape painter, it is his style that inspires the critic's praise, and his subject that inveigles the untutored beholder.

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

You can domesticate your body, but you can't domesticate your face - even by having a lift or having your nose bobbed. A face bears the reflection of our nature, which in the beginning is veiled by the attractiveness of youth. But as soon as youth begins to go, everything written on the face starts to come to the surface, and pretty soon it's engraved there. No landscape can equal a human face that's been molded by its own owner.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

You can put a gardener behind the wheel, but you can't keep her eyes off the landscape.

You don't go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that's benign conquest. It's a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.

You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.

You conquered the landscape with the soles of shoes, not the tires.

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

You pick up a camera because something has been revealed to you in the landscape or in the human-scape. And you have no choice because it's a gift. And it's like, oh right, I better start doing this!

You're actually inside the surfboard... you're inside the landscape around you and the ocean is surging, you get totally inside the moment and it's so intense that time disappears, you disappear.

You really, really feel like you have no control [participating in franchise] . I mean, it's a huge juggernaut, especially when something becomes part of the cultural landscape in a way as well. It's really scary because you get trapped and you get scared of changing, which is the worst thing that can happen if you want to be any kind of artist.

You're an animal that needs to move across the landscape, you can't anymore, and that's another way we're just changing the surface of the Earth in very dramatic ways.

...architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades...

Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest,warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance

A high upland common was this moor, two miles from end to end, and full of furze and bracken. There were no trees and not a house, nothing but a line of telegraph poles following the road, sweeping with rigidity from north to south; nailed upon one of them a small scarlet notice to stonethrowers was prominent as a wound. On so high and wide a region as Shag Moor the wind always blew, or if it did not quite blow there was a cool activity in the air. The furze was always green and growing, and, taking no account of seasons, often golden. Here in summer solitude lounged and snoozed; at other times, as now, it shivered and looked sinister. ("The Higgler")

An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time.

... and isn't the world a treasure in itself? A spectacle glittering every single day, without a concern if anyone's watching or not. It simply goes on, elegantly, letting nature have its way. We only need to open our eyes to witness the biggest masterpiece ever created, the ticket is already in your hand.

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.

As she gobbled up the miles, big ravines appeared before her, their starving mouths open for the swallow.

As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places -- but we are far less good at saying what place makes of us. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Come down to the water.’ It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look, I see fire: that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Colorado and Wyoming are America’s highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado’s lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River’s’ brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming’s Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers.

Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.