Red River Gorge Quotes

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience, not of the place, but of yourself in that place... nobody can discover the world for anybody else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond, and we cease to be alone.

Beyond the river and ten miles east of the city the Sangre Mountains began to reveal themselves in more detail as the sun rose higher, the rampart of blue shadow dissolving in the light, exposing the fissured red cliffs, the canyons and gorges a thousand feet deep, the towers leaning out from the main wall, the foothills dry and barren as old bones, and above and behind these tumbled ruins the final barrier of granite, the great horizontal crest tilted up a mile high into the frosty blue sky, sparkling with a new fall of snow. The mountains loomed over the valley like a psychical presence, a source and mirror of nervous influences, emotions, subtle and unlabeled aspirations; no man could ignore that presence; in an underground poker game, in the vaults of the First National Bank, in the realtor's office during the composition of and intricate swindle, in the heart of a sexual embrace, the emanations of mountain and sky imprinted some analogue of their nature on the evolution and shape of every soul.

What men know and presume about the earth is part of it, passing always back into it, carried on by it into what they do not know. Even their abuses of it, their diminishments and dooms, belong to it.

Crying Call nestled in a river gorge, with raw peas on either side. The red stone, the dark green of the pines, the white glaze of snow, and the arching, varnished sky spread around her. She stopped at the overlook and inhaled it al. Her heart was pounding, but with life. A hawk swooped past, screeching.

I can’t do nothing more tonight,” the mountaineer told himself. “Drat my Sunday suit—what will I do without Bolio—now the b’ar season is a-comin’ on? I have had dogs what would have give me pleasure to see slip off yon rock; but this one—I'd almost as soon go over myself. Tomorrow I can tell—unless he’s dropped into the river and been washed away. And he did it a-guardin’ us, too. Damn. What a dog! I don’t know what he met, but I'll bet a thousand dollars out of my next week’s salary that that stranger thought hed run plumb into a mangling machine. If Bolio went off that rock, he had company, that’s sure. It would be just like him to turn up here tomorrow morning.” But on the following morning, with the rain over and the sky clearing, the great black hound did not appear. Jeff Wise was up by daybreak, and his chief business was to find his dog. He woke to a world washed clean; to delicious fall fragrances; to misty hemlocks and a cloud-filled gorge. Before the sun was up, he had been out on the platform of rock; he had searched the wooded brink of the canyon. But not a sign remained of the desperate struggle that had been waged. What the night had concealed, the day could not divulge. The evidence of that obscure and fatal encounter the storm had completely obliterated. The hemlocks shed their rainy fragrances as before; the falls roared their ancient mountain anthem; the rhododendrons shivered dewily, shedding silver drops into their dusky shadows. Giant red dahlias in Jeff's yard seemed to mock him with the affluence of their gorgeous beauty.