And much like the despairity of the woman who can never bear children, my dreams can never bear fruit. They are the mountains I can never climb. The hurdles I can never leap. The seas I can never cross. The skies I can never look up to. Yet, I adopt ...
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shor...
I think in life there is only one absolute truth. Death... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the ab...
While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. ...
Bard the Bowman: All of you! Listen to me! You must listen! Have you forgotten what happened to Dale? Have you forgotten those who died in the firestorm? And for what purpose? The blind ambition of a Mountain King, so riveted by greed he cannot see b...
Shan-Yu: You took away my victory! [Mulan's shoe hits his head] Mulan: No! [Shan-Yu faces Mulan] Mulan: I did. [she pulls back her hair so that Shan-Yu recognizes her] Shan-Yu: The soldier from the mountains... [Mulan runs off with Shan-Yu following]
Looking back, yes, I made too many comebacks. But each comeback I was 100 percent sure that I would win. I never came back for the money, because I didn't need it. The adulation I was getting anyway in other spheres. But I'm a guy who likes to see ho...
Carter Chambers: Even now I cannot understand the measure of a life, but I can tell you this. I know that when he died, his eyes were closed and his heart was open. And I'm pretty sure he was happy with his final resting place, because he was buried ...
[L.D. Newsome goes to turn the television back on] Jack Twist: You sit down, you ol' son of a bitch! [L.D. stops in his tracks] Jack Twist: This is my house! This is my child! And you are my guest! Now sit the hell down before I knock your ignorant a...
Jack Twist: Why is it always so friggin' cold? We oughta go south where it's warm, you know, we oughta go to Mexico! Ennis Del Mar: Mexico? Hell Jack, you know me, about all the travelin' I ever done is round a coffee pot lookin' for the handle.
Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green m...
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled...
The attraction of snowboarding is the freedom it gives you. With a snowboard on your feet the sky is the limit. You can do anything and go anywhere. This is not just for pro riders. It is for everyone. The other amazing thing with snowboarding is how...
There are so many steps you have to go through to reach a high level, so you're kind of building your own, I would say, mountain. You have to go piece by piece by piece. When you're young and really ambitious, you want to jump right up. It kind of te...
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pill...
You don’t sound very patriotic,” observed Tessa. “Weren’t you just reminiscing about the mountains?” “Patriotic?” Will looked smug. “I’ll tell you what’s patriotic,” he said. “In honor of my birthplace, I’ve the dragon of Wa...
I pictured love as a big hairy giant with a dead fish in his mouth. Grizzly bear claws and his heart half out of his chest cause it’s too big and the lungs have to fit. He never stops walking. Over mountains. Through the desert. On top of icy lakes...
Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.
Mind you, I'm a fine one to talke. I mean, I killed myself and just look at me now: I'm a qualified pilot, I can escape from a cockpit in five metres of water and I'm halfway up a mountain with a nutty gymnast who wants to chuck herself off the edge.
Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the bla...
