“Ideas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish.” — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share Image
“Look — here it comes, its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle top, rises from sift, is lashed & trussed with fishing line. It is drift: it has cuttlefish nails & sea-poppy horns, it breathes… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share Image
“The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that the streets imprint on us,… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“I had started climbing trees about three years earlier, or rather, re-started; for I had been at a school that had a wood for… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“My grandparents... planted their land up with trees, both those native... and exotics which stood in memory of the countries where they had lived.” — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing. — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage,… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree. — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“...the instinct and the body (the felt smoothness of pebbles, the seen grain of light) must know in ways that the conscious mind cannot.” — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“meaning indifferent to the distinction between things. It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“...he suggested that paths were imprinted with the 'dreams' of each traveler who had walked it and that his own experiences would in course… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
“Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history,… — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share
