Landscapes Quotes

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams

“Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks

“Sunlight shines beauty aglow, by the banks of the river that quietly flow. Misty rain yields comfort to a muggy night. Wind of a gentle breeze, calming the skies destine of rendering light.”
― sherman kennon, Whisk Of Dust: Too Unseen Distance

“To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, “through seas that keel has never cut before.” If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People (Norton Library

“Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.”
― Robert Hughes

“Water is always working, reorganizing the land.”
― Tim Palmer, Endangered rivers and the conservation movement

“Stepping out onto any lookout, you are invited to connect with an amazing example of some of the most unusual terrain on this planet, making you feel as though you are stepping foot on the edge of another world.”
― Stefanie Payne, A Year in the National Parks: The Greatest American Road Trip

“I looked back over my shoulder to the valley below. In the light of the setting sun, the falls had gone molten gold. It must have been a trick of the mist or the angle, but it was as if the water had caught fire. The sun sank lower, setting every pool alight, turning the valley in to a crucible.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“But I'd begun, slowly, to understand that complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or cPTSD, was different. It was particularly difficult to treat, because - like a flat landscape - it didn't offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with. Complex post-traumatic stress, according to the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, is the result of 'prolonged, repeated trauma,' rather than individual traumatic events. It's what happens when you're born into a world, shaped by a world, where there's no safety, ever. When the people who should take care of you are, instead, scary and unreliable, and when you live years and years without the belief that escape is possible.

When you come from a world like this, when all your muscles are trained to tension and suspicion, normal life feels unbearable. It doesn't make sense, getting up, going to class, eating lunch, returning home, sleeping. You don't trust it. It doesn't feel real. And unreality can hurt more than pain.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“There is a beautiful village in every country.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Landscape, which looks so constant, is on the move. The mountains dream on the horizon, but mountains are just passing through. I watch them, wearing, grinding, rising up out there, their motion still the main beat.”
― Jill Frayne, Starting Out In the Afternoon: A Mid-Life Journey into Wild Land

“Scrubby evergreen bushes released a strong scent of resin and honey; forests of pine gave way to gentle south-facing vineyards disturbed only by the ululation of early summer cicadas. Sitting up tall on the seat, she craned around eagerly to see what plants thrived naturally.
It was a wild and romantic place, Laurent de Fayols had written, the whole island once bought as a wedding gift to his wife by a man who had made his fortune in the silver mines of Mexico. One of three small specks in the Mediterranean known as the Golden Isles, after the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that glowed like lamps in their citrus groves.
There were few reference works in English that offered information beyond superficial facts about the island, and those she had managed to find were old. The best had been published in 1880, by a journalist called Adolphe Smith. Ellie had been struck by the loveliness of his "description of the most Southern Point of the French Riviera":


'The island is divided into seven ranges of small hills, and in the numerous valleys thus created are walks sheltered from every wind, where the umbrella pines throw their deep shade over the path and mingle their balsamic odor with the scent of the thyme, myrtle and the tamarisk.”
― Deborah Lawrenson, The Sea Garden

“Sam scanned the orchards. U-Pickers laughed and posed for photos with apples on their heads, babies in the baskets, hugging trees. She lifted her head to study the sky, blue as her eyes. The clouds moved across the sun, blocking it out for long distances at a time, causing the landscape in front of her to become illuminated one patchwork piece at a time: the rolling hills lined with grass and endless rows of trees, peach, tart cherry, apples of every variety; blueberry bushes sitting at the bottom of the hill where the rain pooled; the old red barn where high school kids doled out baskets for fruit, which Sam's father weighed when they returned; the old shed where more high schoolers handed out free donut samples and sips of apple cider to arriving cars; the farmhouse with shutters- designed with apple cutouts- where her grandparents, Willo and Gordon, lived; the blue-green waters of Suttons Bay stretching out beyond the trees, the Old Mission Peninsula jutting into it; the family cornfields that sat across M-22 and would soon be cut into an intricate corn maze filled with spooks and goblins to scare fall visitors.
This slice of northern Michigan was Sam's home, her whole world.”
― Viola Shipman, The Recipe Box

“I take in the large churches, the tall buildings that look like elegant wedding cakes, the city center and monuments. As we leave the city behind, I watch the landscape as Malachi naps with his head on my shoulder. I see so many green fields and squat trees with purple flowers and I find them all beautiful, but then, I doze off, too.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“When looking at an extraordinary landscape, there are no questions, no answers, no desires, no plans, no worries, no past, no present, no future; there is only a deep silence, only a glance!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Like a god going through his world, there stands
One mountain for a moment in the dusk.”
― Robert Browning, Pippa Passes

“Few experiences rival a serious climb for bringing us into close contact with our own limitations. Part engineering project, part chess game, part ultramarathon, mountaineering demands of us in a way that other endeavors do not. After my trip to Cholatse, I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art or even, in its purest form, rugged spirituality—a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to “become what we are capable of becoming.” This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak—Rainier, Cholatse, Everest—the more it fires the imagination.”
― Nick Heil, Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season

“The skyline is beautiful but also desolate and otherworldly. It comes at you by degrees, as you descend the hill, and then suddenly you’re a diver coming upon the hulk of some ravaged galleon at the bottom of the sea.”
― Dominic Smith, Return to Valetto

“We experience new culture with every journey.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“We encountered beautiful souls on the travel path.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“We saw beautiful landscapes on the journey.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“As long as we dare dream, we can occupy new land.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“The undulating terrain was cloaked in lush abundance, the vineyards like garlands of deep green and yellow, orchards and farms sprouting here and there, hillocks of dry golden grass crowned by beautiful sun-gilt houses, barns and silos. And overhead was the bluest sky she'd ever seen, as bright and hard polished as marble.
There was something about the landscape that caught at her emotions. It was both lush and intimidating, its beauty so abundant. Far from the bustle of the city, she was a complete stranger here, like Dorothy stepping out of her whirling house into the land of Oz. Farm stands overflowing with local produce marked the long driveways into farms with whimsical names- Almost Paradise, One Bad Apple, Toad Hollow. Boxes and bushels were displayed on long, weathered tables. Between the farms, brushy tangles of berries and towering old oak trees lined the roadway.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Apple Orchard

“The table before the emperor was spread with an entire city of sugar, a city so resplendent it was as though a door had opened into heaven itself. Groves of trees dotted the the table's landscape with beautiful painted castles nestled among hills of pale green. Stars hung from the trees and graced the castle flags. From the ceiling, many dozens of gold and silver stars hung by ribbons over the table, creating a fantastical sky. Amid this wondrous landscape there were sculptures of ancient Roman gods in various scenes: Jupiter on a mountain, lightning bolt in hand; Venus born from a sea of blue; Bacchus in drunken debauchery in a grove of delicate green vines. Ever one to be in control, Michelangelo had insisted he not only develop the many dozen molds but that he also be the one to pour the sugar and finalize the details with sugar paste.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“I was raised in the desert and always appreciated the way its landscape gives you a chance to see what's coming. In Florida, dangers don't reveal themselves until it's too late. The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence.
But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already.
Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Nepal features an astonishing range of cultures and landscapes within its short bounds, including the birthplace of the Buddha, the home of the Gurkhas, the roof of the world, and the country of mythology and beauty.”
― Santosh Kalwar, Why Nepal Fails

“I have very pleasant memories of Arizona, the only flaw I found in it was that any given point in the landscape always looked so much better than it was when you got to it.”
― Maxwell E. Perkins

“As early humans moved about, they were accompanied by a whole entourage of creatures they had come to depend on, or learned to coexist with — not only their crop plants and domesticated animals, which they carried with them deliberately, but also the creatures that had adopted them during their lengthy process of developing agriculture and animal husbandry and building habitations and cities, roads and canals, seaports and fortifications. To quote Anderson [Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life:]

‘Unconsciously as well as deliberately man carries whole floras about the globe with him, he now lives surrounded by transported landscapes, and our commonest everyday plants have been transformed by their long associations with us so that many roadsides and dooryard plants are artifacts. An artifact, by definition, is something produced by man, something which we would not have if man had not come into being. That is what many of our weeds and crops really are.”
― Richard Orlando, Weeds in the Urban Landscape: Where They Come from, Why They're Here, and How to Live with Them

“Taking photos, doing our best to record the experience, but all the while knowing we couldn’t possibly capture this, not through a camera lens anyway. It was a landscape that only the richness of memory could do justice to.”
― Anna McNuff, Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups