Sense Of Place Quotes

“I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.”
― William Golding, The Spire

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There is no mysterious essence we can call a 'place'. Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

“I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.”
― Frances Mayes, Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy

“..and how sometimes when she can’t get her clients talking about what happened over there she’ll get a map of the country, an appropriate map for their world, and pinpoint where they last lived, where their family went missing.
Sometimes they would be reluctant to talk, but when they saw the map they would point to a place and say, “There. My village,”
and that’s how their dialogue would begin. With a sense of place.”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son

“Prairies are like people. Each one has similar characteristics, but each one is also as unique as a snowflake. When we spend time on different prairies, we discover they all have their own quirks, individuality, and charm.”
― Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction

“I don't know why--there are no brick gables,' said Mrs. Prest, 'but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than Venice. It's perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.”
― Henry James, The Aspern Papers

“Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Our brains are hardwired to think in terms of place and to associate psychic value or meaning to the places we inhabit.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“We both know there's no returning to the beginning, no knowing who you've always been, no going home again. But we also know that there's no staying where you are: that the moment that your body sutures together into a whole and steady place you know, something will give way and you'll be changed to mere parts again.”
― Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken My Body: Essays

“The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot—domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home—"a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?)”
― Howard Mansfield, The Bones of the Earth

“You're from somewhere, aren't you?”
― Elizabeth Hadaway, Fire Baton

“They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghost, unrooted and uprooted .... the Kwakwaka'wakw mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plain of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season --- they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them?”
― Brian Doyle, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson

“My hand slid into his. The warmth of his hand surrounded mine and made me wish Carson Boulevard was miles more than six lanes wide. He let my hand go when we made it to the sidewalk.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, One Night

“The glimmering before the final closing down of darkness showed woods blackening against the sunset, woods bearing names of Odin and Thor. Rocks going up blackly into the gloaming were said to be the altars of the Druids: rain from the northern clouds had fallen into these rock-basins unprofaned by the human hand. Those bridges, becoming dense and iron thick in their blue-blackness as they spanned river and broad stream , were many of them the work of Roman soldiery.”
― Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Helen of Four Gates

“The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods.”
― Nancy Zafris, The Home Jar: Stories

“He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“. . . I had on . . . black jeggings under a fitted, sleeveless, flowered dress, so he could see my true shape as well as my eclectic style, which gave the middle finger to the coldness of winter.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, One Night

“Drunken women in very sheer catch-a-cold-or-catch-a-man dresses were acting like they were on spring break in Cancún. Inebriated men in dark suits were . . . making passes and grabbing asses and refilling glasses.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, One Night

“When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“I thought of the dress that she wore last time
When we stood 'neath the cypress-trees together
In that lost land, in that soft clime
In the crimson evening weather”
― Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Poems

“I thought of the dress
that she wore last time
When we stood 'neath
the cypress-trees together
In that lost land, in that soft clime
In the crimson evening weather”
― Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Poems

“There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.

Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.

The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.

The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.”
― Brian Doyle, Mink River: A Novel

“Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place’, and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product.”
― Jeff VanderMeer