#climb

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. ↗

— Robert Macfarlane

#climbing #mountains #wilderness #imagination

As she walked along she dramatized the night. There was about it a wild, lawless charm that appealed to a certain wild, lawless strain hidden deep in Emily’s nature—the strain of the gypsy and the poet, the genius and the fool. ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#emily #nature

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#climbing #done #floating #grand #grand canyon

And still I'm not completely happy with my skating. I always feel I can do more and climb higher. ↗

— Oksana Baiul

#climb #completely #feel #happy #higher

We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes. ↗

— Amos Bronson Alcott

#climb #failures #finding #heaven #most

I raced supremely well. I felt I was as well fitted to do it as I had ever been, and as perhaps I might ever be. I went climbing three weeks before, because I was feeling fed up with running. ↗

— Roger Bannister

#been #before #climbing #ever #fed

As a little kid, I climbed a lot of trees because I always loved the bird's-eye view. ↗

— Felix Baumgartner

#because #bird #climbed #i #i always

Once you climb to another level, you have to figure out how to sustain it. ↗

— Mary J. Blige

#climb #figure #how #level #once

I said to Scott that the ascent seemed to be going slowly and that I was concerned descending climbers could possibly run out of oxygen before their return to camp IV. ↗

— Anatoli Boukreev

#before #camp #climbers #concerned #could

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs. ↗

— Georg Brandes

#called #climb #compete #could #faster