A Quote by Bill McKibben

what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.
I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."
What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
What? You mean to travel almost five hundred miles alone? No. I can’t let you do that. I . . . I forbid you.” It was Colin’s first attempt at forbidding anyone to do anything, and it worked about as well as he’d expected it to. Which was to say, not at all.
Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him; a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hoardes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he'd ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?
Be always decent and right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit.
I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want.
To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude.
I didn't have any looks, I didn't have any talent, and it was easy for me to say to the Lord, "I don't have anything." If you only knew where I came from ... this leetle-bitty town with no more than twelve hundred people in it. So ... anything I am today, He is the one who has done it [ellipses in source].
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone. When I'm alone I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.
I think I'm probably going to have more luck on tour, on the road, than I am at home, because as hectic as traveling can be, I have a little bit more control, for life situations out there on the road. It's the one aspect of my life I feel like I do have some control of. I can wake up in my hotel room, I'm alone and I can ease into the day and do what I need to do. It's not like I've got to get up and drive the kids to school, feed the dog, get to the gym, go to practice, go pay a bill, you know what I mean?
Lock yourself up in your room or go out in the woods where you an be alone. When you are alone the universe talks to you in flashes of inspiration.
More than half of the matches are won in the dressing room for him. The guy he's playing against is sitting in the locker-room thinking 'oh my God, I'm going to play Rafa Nadal on clay in five sets, that's going to be painful.'
People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.
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