Page Toppers

Quotes

• As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. (Stephen Graham)
• Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. (Rupert Brooke)
• But on and up, where Nature's heart Beats strong amid the hills. (Richard Monckton Milnes)
• Climb the mountains and get their good tidings: Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine into flowers, the winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms, their energy and cares will drop off like autumn leaves. (John Muir)
• Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
• Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Going to the mountains is going home.
• The great mountains of the world are a great remedy if men but did know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom's fount. They are deep in time. (E. R. Eddison)
• The hills, Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun. (William Cullen Bryant)
• In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak; but for that you must have long legs. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• It's not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves. (Edmund Hillary)
• Keep close to nature's heart...and break clear away once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. (John Muir)
• Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. (Phillips Brooks)
• Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
• The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, and of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains. (John Muir)
• Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery. John Ruskin
• My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of church going. (Aldous Huxley)
• Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it. (Sir Edmund Hillary)
• Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains. (Henry Ward Beecher)
• River Deep, Mountain High
  (song by Deep Purple)
• Some of them seemed possessed of an incorrigible inner urge simply to explore, to use whatever excuse was necessary to travel into country where no one else had been, to see where the rivers went, to find a pass through a mountain range that no one else had crossed. (David Thompson)
• This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all....On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen...and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. (Aldo Leopold)
• Tis distance lends enchantment to the view
  And robes the mountain in its azure hue. (Thomas Campbell)
• A volcano is just a mountain with hiccups.
• When spring is dancing among the hills, one should not stay in a little dark corner.
• Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. (Ansel Adams)
• You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments; then the wind blows your footprints away. (Arlene Blum)

Rough Country

(Dana Gioia)

Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottom lands.

A place no engineers can master - where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.

Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine
push through the tangled woods to make a roost
for hawks and swarming crows.

And sharp inclines
where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes.

A hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.

(Chief Dan George)

The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars,
the trail of the sun,
the strength of fire,
and the life that never goes away,
they speak to me.
And my heart soars.