Walking Quotes

“Why is it called a flight of stairs? It should be called The Pekin Duck of stairs, because it's the kind of flying that's composed entirely of walking.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“I was describing the other day my success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town. I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

“Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising, anthropologist Maggie Graham observes in her recent paper. When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia and Alzheimer’s in particular can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be desire to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration. Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia supportive research charity, considers wandering an unhelpful description, because it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move. They may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or a person from their past that they believe to be close by; or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going. It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.”
― Michael Bond

“Nothing in the world pleases her so well as solitude. She is happiest alone in the country. She loves rambling alone in her woods. She loves going out by herself at night. She loves hiding from callers. She loves walking among her trees and musing.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Whenever I need to strategize and come up with a solid plan, I take a long walk. Nature has its way of providing us with answers, seemingly, out of thin air.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Teleportation is weird. Especially if you’re wearing your neighbor’s skin suit and using his body to get around the old fashioned way—by walking. Why don’t you pick me up in a 1990 black Jeep Cherokee?”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“Instead of sidewalks, why not sideruns? After all, the pace of life is faster than it has ever been, so I think our infrastructure’s nomenclature should reflect that.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“There was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Owl Hollow Road by Stewart Stafford

On a bracing night walk,
On leafy Owl Hollow Road,
A raspy voice whispered to me,
Like a deep-croaking old toad.

I moved rapidly on my path,
And then heard phantom feet,
Looked around, empty space,
Only silence replaced the beat.

At my most pressing pace now,
A shadow pointed past my shoulder,
An SUV slammed into my side,
And I broke my back on a boulder.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved”
― Stewart Stafford

“She has one pair of worn sneakers, left over from when she first moved to the city and spent long hours on trudging marches between the buildings. Each time she came to the city's edges and saw the churning brown rivers beyond, Lila Mae would hit a right angle and turn back into the buildings, deeper in. She'd never experienced anonymity like that: it's as if the place stimulates enzymes that form a carapace.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist

“Everyone walks everywhere in country towns, especially the children. Although most are unaware of its impact, it automatically connects bodies to the land. All the temperature changes are keenly felt when little divides the body from its surroundings.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“Walking around is good mind medicine.”
― Richie Norton

“Do you enjoy being out in nature? By 2030, when you're living in your 20 by 30 cement stacked box in the city, you'll probably be able to rent walks in the park for ONLY $19.95 per month.”
― Jarod Kintz, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“He hated walking. It was the most excruciating activity in his day; that was, because of the screaming. You see, passing strangers on a walk is terribly painful for people like Andrei, whose every muscle fights to pretend their mind is not yelling questions like: “DO YOU GO LEFT?! OR DO I? Do I know you? Are you looking at me? Do I look familiar to you? Look down! Peruse the floor, scan left now right. Where are your headphones? It would have been so much easier to look busy if you had just remembered to bring your headphones! They’re coming closer. Don’t look at them. Rub your eyes. Sniffle. Good. Good...We made it. OH GOD ANOTHER ONE.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“There's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt

“Shift Work Disorder is comparable to the walking dead.”
― Steven Magee, Night Shift Recovery

“Every day was like Halloween during the pandemic with everyone walking around like masked bandits!”
― Steven Magee

“In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries. This uncharted identity with its illiminable possibilities is one of the distinctive qualities of urban living, a liberatory state for those who come to emansipate themselves from family and community expectation, to experiment with subculture and identity. It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life's most refined pleasures.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“My mother loved this place, and I think about the day when we brought her up here one last time, right at the very end of her life. It was a strange afternoon; it felt to me as though it should have had more shape, more meaning, but none of us quite knew how to give it the significance we needed. Like so many things in life, you just do your best; but for a long time after we all straggled back to our waiting cars, leaving the gritty ash to blow from the tor's top, I thought, every time it rained, of her body passing slowly into the moor around the tor, and becoming part of it, drawn down by the life-giving water and returned slowly to the earth”
― Melissa Harrison

“On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Walking is a slow and porous experience...To walk is also to be vulnerable: It forces us into physical interaction with surrounding streets, homes, and people. This can delay us, annoy us, even put us in danger. But it connects us to community in a way that cars never can.”
― Gracey Olmstead

“The inverter rooms at the dangerous Desoto Solar Farm were so hot, it was like walking into a sauna!”
― Steven Magee

“Swung by the swing of her seat in her tantalizing gait, her hair in plait pictured a pendulum that caressed her bottom.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love

“A father of the highest caliber will point the way only because he has walked it beforehand. And in the walking he has meticulously cleared it of all the obstructions that would harm his family in the manner that they harmed him when he first cleared them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Walking can become an opportunity to move the body easily, graciously, and freely while drawing within to the non-dimensional ease, grace, and freedom that supports the inner universe.”
― Donna Goddard, The Love of Being Loving

“Hers it was, rather, to run and hurry and ponder on long solitary walks, climbing gates, stepping through the mud, and through the blur, the dream, the ecstasy of loneliness, to see the plover's wheel and surprise the rabbits, and come in the heart of the woods or on wide lonely moors upon little ceremonies which had no audience, private rites, pure beauty offered by beetles and lillies of the valley and dead leaves and still pools, without any care whatever what human beings thought of them, which filled her mind with rapture and wonder and held her there till she must touch the gate post to recollect herself.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Caminar es atesorar
-Translation: To walk is to gather treasure”
― Spanish Proverb

“During long cross-country wanders, you do glimpse that freedom of pure renunciation. When you walk for a long time, there comes a moment when you no longer know how many hours have passed, or how many more will be needed to get there; you feel on your shoulders the weight of the bare necessities, you tell yourself that’s quite enough – that really nothing more is needed to keep body and soul together – and you feel you could carry on like this for days, for centuries. You can hardly remember where you are going or why; that is as meaningless as your history, or what the time is. And you feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems absolutely derisory, minuscule, insubstantial.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Samaritan's Path by Stewart Stafford

On a solo trek on a dusty road,
A volunteer picked up my load,
Heavy things of weight and idea,
Hoisted aloft, a relaxing panacea.

We ran the clock down without ennui,
With songs, jokes, and inflated history,
Scenery and animals to comment upon,
Stones kicked as the sun still shone.

In dusk's bowing light, a reticent parting,
A trip over, happy memories restarting,
With a last handshake, wave, and smile,
We headed for home on the closing mile.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford