Best 381 quotes in «woods quotes» category

A reasonable amount of danger is part of the price of living.

A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.

...as if Hollywood were the name of the enchanted forest where you loose yourself and find yourself, again; the wood that changes you; the wood where you go mad; the wood where the shadows life longer than you do.

As soon as he had disappeared Deborah made for the trees fringing the lawn, and once in the shrouded wood felt herself safe. She walked softly along the alleyway to the pool. The late sun sent shafts of light between the trees and onto the alleyway, and a myriad insects webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. But were they insects, wondered Deborah, or particles of dust, or even split fragments of light itself, beaten out and scattered by the sun? It was very quiet. The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognise her as the garden did. ("The Pool")

As the branches of the trees swayed. I stopped at the grass and laid. A different symphony played out in the woods.

A storm came chasing the sky away. And virgin sands Drank all the water of the evening woods, God's wind blew icicles into the ponds; As I wept I saw gold,- and could not drink. - Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word

At first glance, northern hardwood and hemlock forests aren't very sexy - they are the accountants of the forest world, stable and consistent.

A trail made of pine needles and thistles leads you into the green darkness. The canopy casts shadows on old oaks and dogwoods, and you think you can smell the sour breath of a witch behind you. The wind sighs like a sleeping girl, carrying her bittersweet dreams along the paths to attract any man willing to look for thorn-covered castles. A wolf darts between fallen, rotted wood; maybe he’s the one who can tell you where your heart is, how you’re still breathing.

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.

Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.

But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. ("The Wendigo")

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

Disheartened, enraptured, and strangely lightheaded, Grady emerged from the trees and walked back through town to the island bridge, his ankles and hands marked up with thorn scratches.

Everyone knew you shouldn't go biting into fruit offered to you by magical creatures in the woods, even if you'd thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories.

Each October I walk into the woods looking for bones: rabbit skulls, a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deer with the blood bleached out. What died in the lush of roses and mint shines out from the tangle of twigs that bind it to the place of its last leaping. The living lack that kind of clarity. In late April, when the water spreads out and out till everything is lilies and seepage, there is only the mystery of tracks, a rustle receding in the many reeds. And so the bones accumulate across my windowsill: the flightless wings and exaggerated grins, the silent unmoving reminders of where the glories of April lead.

Every time I think I am out of the woods, I am back in the fire.

Every time I stare into those eyes of yours, they shine like a mirror with the sharp edges, piercing trough every bit of my reflection. It makes me feel like a child lost in the woods. And all of a sudden I hear a song somewhere and a shiver runs down my spine. A song that I have heard somewhere before. A song that makes all my demons dance forcefully at once.

Fairy tales give it to us straight. They tell us something profound and essential - that the woods are real, and dark, and full of wolves. That we will, at times, find ourselves hopelessly lost in them. But these tales also tell us that we are all that we need, that we have all we need - guts, smarts, and maybe a pocketful of breadcrumbs - to find our way home.

grappling with some small understanding of this place, this time, we're in" my poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing

For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated the fault of Junior's sudden deafness. I'd been given stacks of reasons to blame myself for an act of violence committed by another. I had blamed my flirting for his subsequent felony. My college taught me: my rape was my shame. Everyone I'd trusted asked only what I might have done to let it happen. In my gut, I'd always believed I'd caused it. I finally questioned it.

He knew it the same way the woodsman knew it, because he knew trees: but he also knew it with the knowledge of the Wild Man of Greenhallow, who felt every slow green beat of the forest's heart.

He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

How I got into this? Well― Like Frost, you know, I saw two roads diverging in a wood. So I bushwhacked a path in some other direction. I mean―who wants to follow a crowd through the forest?

He moves in darkness as it seems to me Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

Her thoughts came to life in the stillness of the wood, nurtured by the air and the scent and the vividness of it.

If you're a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. 'Enola Gay' would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay, as are any other heartfelt emotions. Singing is gay, but chanting is not gay. Wanking contests are not gay. Neither is all-male cuddling during specially designated periods in football matches, or communal bathing thereafter. (I didn't invent the rules of gay - I'm just telling you what they are.)

I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn’t see, and I accepted it was there, strange but – from where I stood – a beautiful vision.

I feel a great regard for trees; they represent age and beauty and the miracles of life and growth.

If people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

I do not find myself beguiled, let alone enchanted by mortal man or woman with their pretense, show or adornments, yet when I’m alone in the pine-scented cloak of forested mountains, I’m both. It was nearing sunset in the treasure state with not another soul in sight and despite my own plainness and insignificance, I never felt more grounded or at peace; it’s a tranquility only the curvaceous, imposing landscape of the frontier can provide and I was free of the trepidation within my thoughts as I gratefully and prayerfully walked with God. All was well within me and around me for that blissful yet brief moment in time.

If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes then more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and the best wood I have ever known. It is the redistillation of another and more lovely world.

Indeed, he could not be long in discovering that people beyond a suspicion of unbalance, or not obviously coveting the moment's arrest of attention gained them by their statements, never had experience with or knowledge of the restless dead. Slowly accepting this as evidence that no such things existed, Mr. Lecky found terrors deeper, and to him more plausible, to fill that unoccupied place - the simple sense of himself alone, and, not unassociated with it, the conception of a homicidal maniac quietly pursuing him. The first was exemplified by chance solitude in what he had considered deep woods. No part in it was played by natural dismay which he might have felt at finding himself lost, and none by any tangible suggestion of danger. Mr. Lecky could not even remember where or when it was. Long ago, under a seamless gray sky which would probably end with snow; in an autumnal silence free from birds, unmoved by the least breath of wind, he had come to be walking at random impulse. Leaves, yellow, tan, drifted deep and loose over the difficulties of an uneven hillside. His feet crashed and crackled in them. He was not going anywhere. He had nothing in mind. It might have been this receptive vacancy of thought which let him, little by little, grow aware of a menace. The unnatural light leaf-buried ground, the low dark sky, the solitary noise of his unskilled progress - none of them was good. He began to notice that though the fall of leaves left an apparent bright openness, in reality it merely pushed to a distance the point at which the woods became as impenetrable as a wall. He walked more and more slowly, listening, hearing nothing; looking, seeing nothing. Soon he stopped, for he was not going any farther. Standing in the deep leaves beneath trees bare and practically dead in the catalepsy of impending winter, he knew that he did not want to be here. A great evil - no more to be named than, met, to be escaped - waited fairly close. So he left. He got out of those woods onto an open road where he need not watch for anything he could not see.

I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to become a writer now.

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

I'm here because all fairy tales take place in the woods, King Cole, even those that don't.

I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning’s somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.

I love the tactile experience of walking in the woods. It's muted browns, grays, and greens comfort me. The moss and leaves five softly under my boots. Large, scattered rocks feel permanent and unshakable. The pull of the mountain is like gravity for my soul.

I thought how wise he was to lure his rival out into the woods, where every fight's fair.

In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.

I spent the day running through the woods like a wild animal. Being chased by you is the only thing that would have made it more romantic.

In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.

I once took a poo in the woods while hunched over like an animal. It was AWESOME.

I slipped quickly through darkness. A thousand unseen frogs were ribbetting and croaking, a symphony of primal night. I felt like an animal; I ran through the Marble Mountains to my home in the dark woods. The rocks were abrasive pumice, rough and hard like sandpaper, perilous, and yet I felt euphoric, much safer navigating them without light than I had in Etna, in the daylight. I was safe in this world. This was a place for creatures—I felt I had become more of a creature than a girl. I could handle myself in the wild.

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

It's possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

I used to be a wanderess without roots – discontent and bereft of belonging and then he took me to The Last Best Place where I was touched and warmed through. Never before have I felt the breath-taking spirit of the frontier as distinctly as I do here and never before have I felt so at home where all things magnificent are made more so by inspired calm of earthy humility.

It was the hour when snow goes blue and streetlights come on and a hare may pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.

I walked, floated, lighter—forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self—forgiveness for my innocence.