Best 17 quotes in «sense of place quotes» category

The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot—domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home—"a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?)

They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghost, unrooted and uprooted .... the Kwakwaka'wakw mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plain of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season --- they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them?

The glimmering before the final closing down of darkness showed woods blackening against the sunset, woods bearing names of Odin and Thor. Rocks going up blackly into the gloaming were said to be the altars of the Druids: rain from the northern clouds had fallen into these rock-basins unprofaned by the human hand. Those bridges, becoming dense and iron thick in their blue-blackness as they spanned river and broad stream , were many of them the work of Roman soldiery.

He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.

When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.

..and how sometimes when she can’t get her clients talking about what happened over there she’ll get a map of the country, an appropriate map for their world, and pinpoint where they last lived, where their family went missing. Sometimes they would be reluctant to talk, but when they saw the map they would point to a place and say, “There. My village,” and that’s how their dialogue would begin. With a sense of place.

At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.

You're from somewhere, aren't you?

Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest.

Drunken women in very sheer catch-a-cold-or-catch-a-man dresses were acting like they were on spring break in Cancún. Inebriated men in dark suits were . . . making passes and grabbing asses and refilling glasses.

I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

I don't know why--there are no brick gables,' said Mrs. Prest, 'but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than Venice. It's perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.

Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.

My hand slid into his. The warmth of his hand surrounded mine and made me wish Carson Boulevard was miles more than six lanes wide. He let my hand go when we made it to the sidewalk.

. . . I had on . . . black jeggings under a fitted, sleeveless, flowered dress, so he could see my true shape as well as my eclectic style, which gave the middle finger to the coldness of winter.