Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old dispairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 1930
In a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Now picture a valley, dense with pine and tapering cypress, ... there, in a sacred corner, in a cave surrounded by woodland, owing nothing to human artifice. Nature had used her talent to imitate art: she had molded the living rock of porous tufa to form the shape of a rugged arch.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE
nickkahler reblogged
Anako Architecture, Saillon House, Saillon, Switzerland, 2015 (via sedlatchek)
We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
Over the years we saw how the thing stood the test of time, what didn’t work, what had to be rebuilt, what happened when the valley flooded, in different climates. It’s like a handmade object now, erased, redone, adjusted, not just fabricated. It’s part of nature, here for the millennia.
Michael Heizer, “On City,” 2015
Modern Atlanta sits atop a thick loam of history, but sometimes you can't tell without a bit of digging. Historical markers are a blur glimpsed from the windows of cars. The terrain has been razed and raised until it bears no relation to the hills and valleys over which armies fought. There are but four antebellum houses still in the city, and one of them was carted across town some 40 years ago. The symbol of Atlanta is the Phoenix, rising from its own ashes, but perhaps it ought to be the ostrich, burying its head against recognition of its own past.
George Inness, The Valley of the Olives, 1867
nickkahler reblogged
I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I've looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.
László Krasznahorkai, "On Leaving," c. 2000 (via mythofblue)
nickkahler reblogged
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
Vladimir Nabokov, "On Literature," c. 1970 (via tierradentro)
Source: tierradentro
Desmond Morris, "The Expectant Valley" as Cover for Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, 1976
"Mosaic of a Zodiac" from the Beth Alpha Church, Jezreel Valley, Israel, c. 500s CE