Here are some of the most thought-provoking, electrifying lines I copied in my One Line A Day diary (a basic, leather look Week To View I bought for a quid) in January. There are several from Katherine May’s latest book Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age. Most of the lines in Enchantment are highly quotable.
I shot the accompanying photographs in Iceland on a drive from Akranes to Reykjavik at the beginning of the year. My head had been in a fucking horrible place before the drive, but the moment I saw fog engulf the mountain tops, my horrible mood swiftly softened and soared.
‘In the age of materialism we hunger and we hoard, but in many ways we’ve never felt so far removed from our animal bodies.’
Elizabeth Kim (Cunning Folk, The Vampire Issue)
‘What I know for sure is that my first true love was the land I saw around me…’
Pam Houston
‘One of the things I love most about the natural world is the way it gives you what’s good for you even if you don’t know it at the time.’
Pam Houston
‘Sublime landscapes are liminal spaces that divorce us from the comfortable everyday and take us to the edge of understanding.’
Katherine May (Enchantment)
‘Reading is the whole of me, the foundation upon which I rest…’
Katherine May (Enchantment)
‘Childhood used to have dirt under its nails.’
Katherine May (Enchantment)
‘No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.’
Raymond Carver (Quoting an Isaac Babel story)
‘…guard your yes with your life.’
Rene Brooks
‘I have learned that whenever I think “I don’t have enough time to do that” what I usually mean is “I don’t have enough energy” or “I am no actually interested in doing this.”
James Clear
‘Even as I write these words I am planning / to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.’
Marie Howe (Prayer)
‘Go to the limits of your longing.’
Rainer Maria Rilke
‘Like most people in Britain, I no longer have any daily connection with its woods.’
Peter Fiennes
A Wyrd Of Her Own 