Mountains Quotes

“What I am trying to tell you,” Trinka said softly, looking back at him, “is that there are good ways to live, and bad ones. This is not a matter of opinion; it is objective truth. The Empire fights the Wilders because we need their land; that’s true. But there are other reasons. We fight them because they are unworthy. They are not fit to share this world – this divine gift – with folk who do not murder children. With people who do not rape women, or make slaves of the weak. The Wilders are undeserving of the gift of life, of divine choice. They are not fit to be called Children of Bræa. Their way of life is a blight upon the earth. They may look like men, but they live, and behave, like beasts.“If they were able to learn to live like civilized folk,” she sighed, “then we would make it our business to teach them; indeed, I would account it our duty to bring them into the light. We have tried. It has been more than a century since we first began settling the frontiers beyond the mountains, and in the three-score years since Duncala, we have tried many times to bring them the gift of civilization. But if they will not learn to act like civilized men, then civilized men are not obliged to tolerate them. The whole of Bræa’s creation, her divine intent, and her gift of choice to all of us – the gift of choice that grants us the possibility, and therefore the obligation, of bettering ourselves! – cries out against tolerating what by any reasoned definition is utter, bestial depravity. “We are Bræa’s heirs, the inheritors of her divine design. We are not obliged to endure depravity,” she said gravely. “We are obliged to redeem it, if we can; but if we cannot, then our obligation – to ourselves, our posterity, and the Holy Mother’s design – is to end it.” She cocked her head. “In this wise, it might help to think of the Wilders as little different from the hordes of Bardan, whose legacy of death and devastation ended the ancient world, and plunged all into darkness for twice a thousand years.” Her fist clenched involuntarily. “We will not suffer the darkness again, Esuric Mason. My brothers...my former comrades, I mean...they will not allow it.” She looked down at her hands. For a wonder, they were steady. “I will not allow it,” she whispered.- The Wizard's Eye (Hallow's Heart, Book II; Forthcoming)”

“The time it takes to fall from the top of a mountain to the floor it shorter than what it takes to climb from the floor to the top. Only leaders with character can maintain their trusts.”

“The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.”

“I'm a believer that emotions can move mountains, that spirit alone can trump budgets.”

“All mountain people are like that. No matter where you go, the mountains call you back.”

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”

“There is no joy involved in climbing mountains, there is simply the challenge, the self-invented challenge, the play.”

“I'm kind of getting over the whole Manhattan life. I'm from Vancouver, and that means mountains and a lot of space.”

“Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.”

“I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.”

“I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life.”

“The Pleiades and northern lights are still above the mountain. The mountain is in the east, and on its slopes there are reindeer. Reindeer always remind me of trees that have taken to moving. They remind me even more of trees than people do. In the distant past, reindeer were trees as people were, but they haven't come such a long way from their origins, and the branches can be seen although they no longer bear leaves.I have my bedtime book in my hand and my pocket light and walk toward the mountain over the edges of the moorland in rubber boots. The book is a relative of mine, I feel; it is made out of trees and human thought, and thus the relationship becomes twofold. These are ancient poems that I am taking to the mountains and the reindeer.”

“Everything in L.A. is - it's just an easy place to live in. The houses are nice, the backyards are nice, you got the ocean right there and the mountains behind you; there's an idealised easiness to the way you live and the whole environment.”

“Then come to realize that you're making mountains out of molehills. Realize how petty you've become. Sure, it may feel like you can't get a grip on this town. It may seem that every time someone offers you a hand up, they just let go and you slip further down. But you must stop being so pessimistic, Hannah, and learn to trust those around you. So I do. One more time.”

“You don't need to climb a mountain to know that it's high.”

“O Moon that rid'st the night to wakeBefore the dawn is pale,The hamadryad in the brake,The Satyr in the vale,Caught in thy net of shadowsWhat dreams hast thou to show?Who treads the silent meadowsTo worship thee below?The patter of the rain is hushed,The wind's wild dance is done,Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushedAbout the setting sun:And now beneath thy argent beamThe wildwood standeth still,Some spirit of an ancient dreamBreathes from the silent hill.Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokesThe Ancient Ones of night,Once more the old stone altar smokes,The fire is glimmering bright.Scattered and few thy children be,Yet gather we unknownTo dance the old round merrilyAbout the time-worn stone.We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell,Nor mourn our outcast lot,Treading the mazes of a spellBy priests and men forgot.”

“I want to see sunrises in the mountains. You never get to see such things enough in a lifetime. I want to see more.”

“I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: 'Oh my God, what a blessing.' Then you realise it's important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.”

“Declaring the San Gabriel Mountains a national monument will make this natural wonder more accessible. It will welcome people from all walks of life and maintain the mountains' wild character at the same time.”

“I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.”