"The First Morning", p. 1
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.
“For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever?”
Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (p. 281)
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Diane Ackerman 30
Author, poet, naturalist 1948Related quotes
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“One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.”
“In the end we're all searching for our home, that one place where we belong.”
Comments on her work in Time of the Comet http://www.masielalusha.com/projects/comet.php
Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. IX : Outdoors and Indoors, p. 337
Source: Station Eleven (2014), Chapter 13 (p. 78)
Home http://books.google.com/books?id=XEVKAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Home+ought+to+be+our+clearing+house+the+place+from+which+we+go+forth+lessoned+and+disciplined+and+ready+for+life%22&pg=PA48#v=onepage (1928)