“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
July 1890, page 313
John of the Mountains, 1938
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John Muir 183
Scottish-born American naturalist and author 1838–1914Related quotes
“The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.”
Materia Critica (1924)
Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?
Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.
Someone said, "It's all been done before."
Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.
Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
"Correspondances" [Correspondences] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondances
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
