"Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion."
- Robert Macfarlane
"The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course."
"What we bloodlessy call 'place' is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always 'in', never 'on'."
"The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells."
"From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques ..."
"We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear wit..."
"Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses,..."
"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."
"Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because..."
"a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells."