Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park
Conor Knighton
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If nature has a soul, it feels like it must be bound up in the bark and sap of our forests. There, older, wiser sentinels stand in silent judgment. Not just the ancient sequoias and redwoods—even regular pine and birch trees outlast us. Every tree is a witness tree—they see how we spend our time on earth, what we take and what we give.”
“It occurred to me that part of the reason I’d seen so much debate about the year’s first sunrise, and not its last sunset, was that our beginnings always seem more important than our endings. In life, we can often control how things start. Endings are elusive and amorphous and uncertain.”
“To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective,” he wrote. “It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.”
“So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place,” he wrote. “Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best.”
“no longer think there’s one specific path that leads to enlightenment or salvation. I don’t think Muir did, either. Except, perhaps, for the path of the trail itself. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he once wrote. I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.”
“Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes within the broad overwhelming influences of the place fails not to worship as he never did before.”
“When advocating for the sequoias, Muir once wrote, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people.”
“We need places such as Everglades National Park where we may be more keenly aware of our Creator’s infinitely varied, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely bountiful handiwork,” Truman said”
“To know that there was beauty all around me, even if I couldn’t see it.”
“This was the first national park that was set aside by the National Park Service, by the people of the United States, for what is alive,” Alan explained”
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