“Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to… — 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
