The Quotable Walker offers quips, quotes, and little philosophical gems on the subject of walking, hiking, or any sort of journey by foot. These brief sayings and rich, fleeting images will inspire and edify anyone who enjoys a walk in the park, or a hike in Nepal. They cover walking as sport, recreation, work, or spirituality; as an element of urban and rural life, walking in relationships and love and poetry. Quotations come from famous Romantic literary walkers such as Thoreau, Whitman, Wordsworth, Woolf, Baudelaire, Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Hardy, and Joyce, to surrealist walkers such as Breton and Aragon, to Japanese Haiku masters, to epic and visionary poets like Langland and Blake, to the many recent writers of the walk from Dylan Thomas to Annie Dillard to Robert Lowell, from Kafka to anonymous American Indian chants, and many more.
Each quote is memorable both in its content and in its literary quality. They all convey the great excitement, amusement, and inspiration that walking provides. This book will gratify all lovers of walking.
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return–sending back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.–Thoreau
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.–Buddha
Once I dreamt of a form of poetry created by the sound of feet walking in the grass.–Cecilia Vicuna
Give me the clear blue sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner–and then to thinking!–Hazlitt
Roger Gilbert (Cornell University) is the author of Walks in the World. Jeffrey Robinson (University of Colorado) is the author of The Walk. Anne Wallace (University of Southern Mississippi) is the author of Walking, Literature, and English Culture.
