Top 60 Robert Macfarlane Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write;.”

— Robert Macfarlane

2. “We are fallen mostly into pieces but the wild returns us to ourselves.”

— Robert Macfarlane

3. “The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature – a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.”

— Robert Macfarlane

4. “A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.”

— Robert Macfarlane

5. “Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”

— Robert Macfarlane

6. “Potawatomi, a Native American language of the Great Plains region, includes the word puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’.”

— Robert Macfarlane

7. “I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.”

— Robert Macfarlane

8. “As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?”

— Robert Macfarlane

9. “Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”

— Robert Macfarlane

10. “All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world’s disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.”

— Robert Macfarlane

11. “We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land.”

— Robert Macfarlane

12. “The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.”

— Robert Macfarlane

13. “We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit.”

— Robert Macfarlane

14. “The word “landmark” is from the old English “landmearc”, meaning ’an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one’s course.”

— Robert Macfarlane

15. “We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.”

— Robert Macfarlane

16. “To enter water is, of course, to cross a border. You pass the lake’s edge, the sea’s shore, the river’s brink – and in so doing you arrive at a different realm, in which you are differently minded because differently bodied.”

— Robert Macfarlane

17. “To further our knowledge,’ Christopher replies without hesitation, ’and to give life meaning. If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.”

— Robert Macfarlane

18. “We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”

— Robert Macfarlane

19. “Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.”

— Robert Macfarlane

20. “The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.”

— Robert Macfarlane

21. “I relish the etymology of our word thing – that sturdy term of designation, that robust everyday indicator of the empirical – whereby in Old English thynge does not only designate a material object, but can also denote ‘a narrative not fully known’, or indicate ‘the unknowability of larger chains of events’.”

— Robert Macfarlane

22. “As the Pleistocene was defined by the action of ice, so the Anthropocene is seen to be defined by the action of anthropos: human beings, shaping the Earth at a global scale.”

— Robert Macfarlane

23. “To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then.”

— Robert Macfarlane

24. “We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

— Robert Macfarlane

25. “As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a “continual agitation alive” in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear – this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.”

— Robert Macfarlane

26. “Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.”

— Robert Macfarlane

27. “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away,’ wrote John Berger, ’the talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”

— Robert Macfarlane

28. “Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. The discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting.”

— Robert Macfarlane

29. “This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”

— Robert Macfarlane

30. “For pilgrims walking... every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.”

— Robert Macfarlane

31. “For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.”

— Robert Macfarlane

32. “We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps – and the road-map is first among them – encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost.”

— Robert Macfarlane

33. “Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.”

— Robert Macfarlane

34. “We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land. It is mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains.”

— Robert Macfarlane

35. “Several small clouds drifted through the sky. When one of them passed before the moon, the world’s filter changed. First my hands were silver and the ground was black. Then my hands were black and the ground silver. So we switched, as I walked, from negative to positive to negative, as the clouds passed before the moon.”

— Robert Macfarlane

36. “Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist – as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.”

— Robert Macfarlane

37. “I am reminded once more of how resistant the underland remains to our usual forms of seeing; how it still hides so much from us, even in our age of hyper-visibility and ultra-scrutiny.”

— Robert Macfarlane

38. “My sense,’ I say to Christopher, ’is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.”

— Robert Macfarlane

39. “I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.”

— Robert Macfarlane

40. “Before you become a writer you must first become a reader.”

— Robert Macfarlane

41. “Beyond a hundred years even generating a basic scenario for individual life or society becomes difficult, let alone extending compassion across much greater reaches of time towards the unborn inhabitants of worlds-to-be. As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists.”

— Robert Macfarlane

42. “I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.”

— Robert Macfarlane

43. “Science is full of this stuff: full of happenstance and stumbles and getting knackered and crazy in the field or the lab. It’s so weird to me how science always presents its knowledge as clean.”

— Robert Macfarlane

44. “The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.”

— Robert Macfarlane

45. “We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.”

— Robert Macfarlane

46. “Once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit.”

— Robert Macfarlane

47. “Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression.”

— Robert Macfarlane

48. “No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.’ He gestures at the data read-out. ‘If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.”

— Robert Macfarlane

49. “Reading kept him alive,’ she said, ’right till the end.”

— Robert Macfarlane

50. “What we bloodlessy call ‘place’ is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always ‘in’, never ‘on’.”

— Robert Macfarlane