“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. The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'. A creature's… — 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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing. — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share Image
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 Image
I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree. — Robert Macfarlane Copy Share Image
“...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 Image
“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 Image
