Places

"A place where I can find out again—where I am—and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again."

"When a place is central to a good writer's imagination, it is because that place has become a metaphor for larger concerns."

"You don't want to stand on a corner and be told to get off it when you got nowhere else to go. And we want somewhere else to go."

"The place is silent and aware; It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, But that is its own affair."

"All places are distant from heaven alike."

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."

"We are children of our landscape. It dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure in which we are responsive to it."

"Man is only an extension of the spirit of place."

"It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper, "I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?""

"The great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in with reverence, idly—but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there."

"The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholders."

"No two persons can ever see the same landscape."

"I had my existence. I was there. Me in the place and the place in me."

"God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Belovèd over all."

"Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality."

"I have lived in a place, I shall die in a place, I have no craving for distant lands. But a place is nothing, not even space, Unless at its heart a figure stands."

"How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life."

"    All places are alike, And every earth is fit for burial."

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."

"In some places you can pass through all the changes of fifty centuries in the space of five minutes. Everything is delineated, sculptured, etched. Even the waste lands have an eternal cast about them. You see everything in its uniqueness—a man sitting on a road under a tree: a donkey climbing a path near a mountain: a ship in a harbor in a sea of turquoise: a table on a terrace beneath a cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as if for the first time; it won't run away, it won't be demolished overnight; it won't disintegrate or dissolve or revolutionize itself. Every individual thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space."

"No, as with the sacred places so with the murderous spots—the record of events is written into the earth.[…] Certain spots stand out like semaphores, revealing not only the clue but the event—provided, to be sure, they are approached with utter purity of heart."

"One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

"To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom."

"Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places."

"Human identity presupposes the identity of place."

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place […]. You needn't to look up at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got."

"Non hominis culpa, sed ista loci."

"Pensai a quanti luoghi ci sono nel mondo che appartengono così a qualcuno, che qualcuno ha nel sangue e nessun altro li sa."

"Nullus locus sine genio."

"All places that the eye of heaven visits, Are to a wise man ports and happy havens."

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

"What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."

"It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it."

"I think there is a fatality in it; I seldom go to the place I set out for."

"One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew.[…] Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho.'"

"Nothing will tell you where you are. Each moment is a place you've never been."

"'Space' is more abstract than 'place'. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value."

"  Geniumque loci, primamque Deorum Tellurem, Nymphasque, et adhuc precatur Numina."

"A jolly place," said he, "in times of old, But something ails it now; the spot is curse'd."

"There is nothing more fragile than the balance of beautiful places."