Forests Quotes

“Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“Walls protect, divide, distinguish; above all they abstract. The basic activities that sustain life . . . take place beyond walls.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“Soul and habitat--we are finally in a position to know this--are correlates of one another.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“Irony that does not deem itself ironic is the most dangerous irony of all.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“Decadence begins with the loss of restraint.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death. ”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

“Walls, no less than writing, define civilization. They are monuments of resistance against time, like writing itself. . .”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization