Home > Topic > The terrain
1 " When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all. "
― Dorothea Lasky
2 " To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere. "
― Rebecca Solnit , Wanderlust: A History of Walking
3 " The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent. "
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke , The Eclipse: A Memoir Of Suicide
4 " Sheep are always looking for a new shepherd when the terrain gets rocky. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Iced (Fever, #6)
5 " This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling. "
6 " Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain. "
― David Abram , Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
7 " Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change. "
― Celeste Ng , Everything I Never Told You
8 " Explanations of straight men's homosexual behavior take the awkwardness, shame, and ambivalence attached to these encounters as evidence of discordance between self and behavior, forgetting that these affectations characterize the terrain of sexuality more broadly. For example, among the many costs of sexism is that sex is often utterly scripted and unsatisfying for straight women, and yet straight women's sexual dissatisfaction is rarely taken as evidence that they are acting out of accordance with their heterosexual orientation. "
― , Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men
9 " When it comes to current attitudes about surgery, the practice of dismissing the cultural context and rationalizing it as individual betterment " flattens the terrain of power relations." In other words, we can talk about doing it for us until our high-end lipstick flakes off, but we should also keep in mind that we probably wouldn't even be thinking about what life would be like with a new nose or perkier breasts or shapelier inner thighs if it weren't for a long-standing cultural ideal that rewards those who adhere to it with power that often doesn't speak its name, but is instantly recognizable to those who don't have it. "
10 " Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love. "
― Sharon Salzberg , Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
11 " The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart. "
― Shannon Huffman Polson , North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
12 " If I had echolocation I could map out the terrain of ab muscles through sheer force of will. His cut body is meant to be relief mapped the way Braille is meant to be read. With my fingertips. "
13 " …it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: ‘UNSURVEYED.’ It was as if the mapmakers had said, ‘We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won’t know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle – and the chances are we won’t know then! "
― Beryl Markham
14 " If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference. "
― Jay Woodman
15 " The snow in the mountains had changed everything. Frank swore as he listened on the phone to the head of search and rescue describing the conditions they'd run into on the other side of the Crazies. " The terrain is too dangerous," Jim Martin said. " Even experienced ground crews found many areas too difficult to traverse with the snow." " What about the searchers in the helicopters?" " They should be able to see tracks in the snow once the clouds life." Jim didn't sound optimistic. " The storm isn't moving on as fast as the weatherman predicted. "
16 " Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. "
― , The Situationists and the City: A Reader
17 " There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. "
― Adrienne Rich , Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
18 " Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul. "
― Patrick Süskind , Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
19 " All the same I fear what happens when we expand the terrain of medical practice to include actively assisting people with speeding their death. I am less worried about the abuse of these powers than I am about dependence on them. "
― Atul Gawande , Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
20 " She didn't pick her way over the terrain like she was afraid of slipping on the ice...She glided over it with long confident strides. Her hands were in her vest pockets. Her eyes were Susannah. "
― Shirley A. Martin , Bloodline Gypsy: Jook and Gypsies Vol. 1
