"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is."
— Ellen DeGeneres

"Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time."
— Steven Wright

"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"I like long walks, especialy when they are taken by people who annoy me."
— Noel Coward

""Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.""
— Pablo Neruda

"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Gauguin was a stockbroker in Paris, married, had five kids. One day he came home from work and told his wife he was leaving, that he was through supporting the family, that he had had enough. Just like that he fucking took off. He said he had always felt that he was a painter, so he moved to a rat-infested shithole and started painting. His wife begged him to come back, his bosses told him he was insane, he didn't care, he was following his heart. He left Paris, moved to Rouen, went from Rouen to Arles, from Arles to Tahiti. He was searching for peace, contentment, trying to fill that fucking hole he felt inside, and he believed he could fill it. He died in Tahiti, blind and crazy from syphilis, but he did it. He filled his fucking hole, made beautiful work, made beautiful, beautiful work... It takes a brave man to walk away, to care so much that he doesn't care about anything else, to be willing to obey what he feels inside, to be willing to suffer the consequences of living for himself. Every time I stand before his work it makes me cry, and I cry because I'm proud of him, and happy for him, and because I admire him.
"
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"“He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to. - Waterless Mountain – "
— Laura Adams Armer, 1932

"If the good Lord had meant for us to walk, he wouldn t have invented roller skates."
— Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory (the original)

"The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin."
— Bruce Chatwin (What Am I Doing Here?)

""Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?" "
— Werner Herzog (Of Walking in Ice)

"...the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The promenade is a special subset of walking."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Walking is a pastime rather than an avocation."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"'A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the althernative scenerios explored in a detective novel.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot."
— Wendell Berry (Remembering)

"A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)