Best 381 quotes in «woods quotes» category

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 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 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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

I’ve heard this sound before, she realized, her entire body tingling. She’d caught glimpses of it, like a distant haunting refrain, in her deepest moments of silence in the wood. When the long days stretched timelessly on, and her mind emptied of thoughts until there was only her footsteps in the snow, only the feel of the bow in her hand, the bite of cold on her cheeks. When everything else faded away, this sound was what was left.

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.

I was in a copse of pine trees, and the pine was overpowering my scent. The pheromones of the big cat mingled with the pine and I spun around. I was smelling and looking for the flash of white, but I couldn’t see it. I grew angry and I pawed at the earth. The aroma of the soil cleansed my nose as I leaned down and sniffed deeply. I slowly closed and opened my eyes. As I looked ahead I saw something. There, further on, I had another glimpse of the large white cat. She was stopped and her hindquarters were in the air. I stared, trying to figure out what she was doing. Her forepaws and head were on the ground, but her hind was wiggling. She was next to a tree, marking it, so I slowly paced in a zigzag pattern as I walked close to her. I was being cautious because poachers had been known to employ shifters to entice real animals in the wild. She turned her head and growled at me. I took it as an invite to come closer. I ran up to her and started circling. She was an albino panther as I thought. I paced closer, breathing deep. I was in the middle of Ohio, outside of a lost cougar and a few bobcats there were no big cats here, at least not counting lycanthropes, and this creature didn’t smell like one of those. Her rump almost wagged in anticipation, and I felt my tiger body respond. I circled her, taking a swipe in her direction to see if she was going to respond negatively to me. The pink eyes followed me and she growled. I walked up to her, sniffed her face and neckline. I didn’t smell any other male on her, and I walked to her raised rump. Burying my nose in her groin I smelled deeper, and she shifted her body. I felt it before I could see it. She was shifting, changing from albino panther to human. I sat on my hindquarters as I watched. Her white fur seemed to melt from her, sliding upwards, starting with her back legs. The flesh and fur on her feet slid forward, leaving human feet and calves. It was fully fleshed, unlike some lycanthrope changes when they’re younger. The calves of her legs appeared, and slowly slid up. The panther flesh was sliding forward, slowly and methodically. Across her ass and groin, now lower back and stomach. The pheromones I smelled earlier were coming from her, the human form. I stood and started pacing behind her, and her panther head shook in a very human gesture. I stopped, fighting the desire to lean forward and lick her wetness with my large tongue. The flesh was sliding forward and as her teats turned into breasts, I growled in need. Next were her shoulders and arms, then her head and hands. As the transformation ended, there was a pile of fur and flesh lying in front of her. Her human form was beautiful; a full figured woman with long white hair, that was perfectly natural. She looked to be in her early forties, but didn’t have a line on her face that she didn’t want. In the corners of her eyes were small, but beautiful, crow’s feet, laugh lines surrounded her mouth. She laid out with her former form under her, laying on it, propped up by her elbows. She smiled with the confidence of someone who was used to being in charge. Her long hair flowed around her shoulders, framing her body. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t figure out who.

I wish to learn silence from the dark woods, the unused middle rooms, from the girls in their white dresses,

Long before haunted houses existed, haunted woods circled the globe. Homer knew it. The Brothers Grimm knew it. In legend, all the great mythic quests of self-discovery begin with the hero entering a dark wood. Some journeys also end there.

Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.

Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

Marini ubbidì e i messaggi sonori del bosco li raggiunsero come aliti di un organismo ospite. Non c’era silenzio come Teresa aveva immaginato, ma una sinfonia di voci armoniose legate le une alle altre da una simbiosi profonda: i richiami tra i rami verdeggianti, lo scroscio dell’acqua che cadeva tra le rocce, lo sciabordio dolce che emetteva quando scorreva più lenta, a monte. I crepitii repentini tra i rovi, i fruscii di esseri striscianti, nel sottobosco. Il vento era un fremito che percorreva le sommità degli alberi come un’onda che fletteva e risollevava. Anche la luce sembrava avere un suono in quello spazio fatto di vibrazioni: era un tono basso che si allungava sulla pelle di Teresa, sui petali dei fiori, sulle foglie e sulle cortecce e ne liberava il profumo. Saltava sull’acqua in giochi luminosi e scaldava la pietra luccicante.

Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.

Most people feared the darkness. Some people feared, more wisely, the things within the darkness. Gabriel feared both, and with good reason. He walked anyway. That had always been his way. He had a complicated history with the woodlands of the world. He'd met his share of the Cyclops and the Circes that lurked within. And the world never seemed to run out of monsters.

My breathe would catch at the sight of violets-so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet's message was "Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in." p264

My time in the woods is time spent with a tutor on how to live.

Nothing can match the joy of a forest in the morning.

Och med en annan sak blir jag aldrig färdig: Att draga mig tillbaka och sitta i ensamheten i skogen och ha det gott och mörkt omkring mig. Det är den sista glädjen. Det är det höga, det religiösa i ensamheten och mörkret, som gör att man har behov av dem, det är däremot icke därför man söker sig bort från de andra, att det bara är sig själv man härdar ut med, nej, nej. Men det är det mystiska, att allt brusar fjärran och dock så nära en, man sitter i mitten av en allestädes närvarande. Det är väl Gud. Det är väl en själv som är en del av allt.

Oh, but you must travel through those woods again and again... said a shadow at the window... and you must be lucky to avoid the wolf every time... But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once.

On a midsummer night, on a night that was eerie with stars, In a wood too deep for a single star to look through, You led down a path whose turnings you knew in the darkness, But the scent of the dew-dripping cedars was all that I knew. I drank of the darkness, I was fed with the honey of fragrance, I was glad of my life, the drawing of breath was sweet; I heard your voice, you said, 'Look down, see the glow-worm!' It was there before me, a small star white at my feet.

... or in the forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops.

(Ren's) eyes were sad but resigned. “And where will you go?” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my reply. “I don’t know.” “Please don’t do this,” he whispered. “Come back with me. We’ll talk to Logan; there has to be an explanation. The Keepers need us; we’re the alphas. We’ll figure this out. They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them.

She hadn't meant to fall asleep, but she was a bit like a cat herself, forever wandering in the woods, chasing after squirrels and rabbits as fast as her skinny legs could take her when the fancy struck, climbing trees like a possum, able to doze in the sun at a moment's notice. And sometimes with no notice at all.

She hadn't meant to fall asleep, but she was a bit like a cat herself, forever wandering in the woods, chasing after squirrels and rabbits as fast as her skinny legs could take her when the fancy struck, climbing trees like a possum, able to doze in the sun at a moment's notice. And sometimes with no notice at all. (This text is originally from A Circle of Cats, which was revised and re-adapted by the author for The Cats of Tanglewood Forest)

...she had the top down and I could smell everything in those woods, and you know what an old fine smell that is, like something which has been mostly left alone and is not much troubled. ("Mrs. Todd's Shortcut")

Some of the best advice you will ever hear will come from the forest.