Wandering Home Quotes

“I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

“...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

“Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

“Most of the time now we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of our consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half-truth at best—”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

“What we need more of are people who actually know what they’re doing out in the physical world—who know so well that they can not just carry forward old tradition but work out new and better ways of doing things.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

“You want to be thinking your least selfish thoughts in his company, which is what we mean, I guess, when we say that someone “brings out the best in you.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

“On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation in under way. It took you a while to get there, so you're obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word, and you bring with you the news of the road, not the news you heard on All Things Considered.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

“only in relatively recent times have people decided that “because I want to” is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else—”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape

“(Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads).”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape