Wild Quotes

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...

Stories don't always have happy endings."
This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they just need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with them.
-Carrie Bradshaw

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn't stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one's place in the world. To say 'I am here.' To say 'I am.

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

You could be David's friend too". She glanced at Tamani when he said nothing. He was frowning. "The two of you really have a lot in common, and we're all in this together".
He shook his head. "It wouldn't work".
"Why not? He's a nice guy. And it would do you good to have some human friends", she said hinting at what she suspected was the root of the problem.
"It's not that", Tamani said, gesturing vaguely with one hand.
"Then why?" Laurel asked, exasperated.
"I just don't want to cosy up to the guy whose girl I have every intention of stealing

Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.

She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch she'd rush away again.

She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.

I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once.

There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage.

If Springtime crawls out of the
wild mouths of flowers, then
surely, Winter crawls out of mine.

... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself...
But wildness is more a quality than a place, and though humans can't manufacture it, they can nourish and husband it...
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

I no longer follow the voices of the sane. I follow the ill because they see farther, feel much more and change what the sane will not. This is the paradox of philosophers---trying to understand mass delusion among great people that have faith and knowledge, yet they can’t graduate from their institutions of religious theology to apply the knowledge they have gained for the shifting of Zion---- from words to action; from comfort to uncomfortable; from self serving to self giving; from competition to supporting; to tradition to unity; from bias to acceptance; from me to us.

Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn't even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways. She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.

It has always been my understanding that truth and freedom can only exist in wild places.

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves.

I was born into chaos. I didn’t know what peace felt like.

Being tame is what we're taught: ... put the crayons back, stay in line, don't talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don't...
As you might know, nice girls DO, and they like to feel wild and alive. Being tame feels safe, being wild, unsafe. Yet safety is an illusion anyway. We are not in control. No matter how dry and tame and nice we live, we will die. And we will suffer along the way. Living wild is its own reward.

That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.

Her life was like a burst of wild, flowing Chinese calligraphy, written under the influence of alcohol.

She was beautiful in a way that only wild things can be beautiful.

Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.

Wounded? was all I could manage. Yes, said Pat. And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Last night I did things my mother told me not to with the people I shouldn't see in the places that I should not go..

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.

I wonder how many women are held up in their bed waiting to be sung to, served wine to, read poetry to, kissed slowly with.

I am more than what they say I am.

You may wish to capture a wild thing as you covet their unbreakable spirit, but as much as you may wish to tame a wild thing, a wild thing, who may grow to love you, will always resist and will do anything, at any cost, even if it means hurting you, to break free. Be careful when playing with a wild thing.

I want you to be with someone who really, really loves you. A wild love! A crazy love! I want yours to be the greatest love story of all time!

The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course

Oh, now my Erin, she'd smile down on me no matter where I walked." Grandpop smiled that little smile again. "But I'd be separated from her, and I'd feel that separation in my soul, you see?"
Nathan shook his head.
Grandpop sighed. "You have the Irish eyes, boy. One of these days, you'll see from eyes, not your own, feel with a heart outside your chest. Wild Irish eyes. Nathan. When you love, love well and love true, and take care, lad, because those Irish eyes are windows into not just your own soul, but the soul of the one you love." Grandpop looked out at his Erin's grave.
"And when you lose that heart, you can't leave the places where your memories are the best. And if I left her, I'd not be buried beside her.

I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.

In a corner of my soul there hides a tiny frightened child, who is frightened by a corner where there lingers something wild.

I came to see myself one day and it was like looking into a mirror. I came to see that at any given moment, I am both equally ready to stay and to leave. It’s like I always have my luggage with me and I can unpack or repack on short notice. I guess that’s something you can call a traveler’s heart. You are ready to stay with every atom in your body; but you are also ready to leave that way. You’re not afraid of forever but you’re also not afraid of nothing at all.

Keep calm. You have the forest in your blood.

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

Thou strange piece of wild nature!

Kiss
like
you
never
had
a past.

The sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.