Quotes & Sayings About Genius Loci

The place was silent and - aware. — P.C. Wren

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate? — Robert D. Kaplan

The deep map configures narratives. It is a matrix of intertexual storytelling, charting our movements through the landscape. — Linda Lappin

It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them ...
After all, perhaps Stevenson had only half of the matter. It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds. ("The Axholme Toll") — Mark Valentine

By the sense of mystery I understand the experience of certain places and times when one's whole nature seems to be in touch with a presence, a genius loci, a potency. — Richard Aldington

What better way to read the landscape than by walking through it? — Linda Lappin

A deep map is a sample swatch of the multiple manifestations of the genius loci. — Linda Lappin

You should open these doors with care and caution-but, first, you must know how to close them. And above all, you must know which doors should be left unopened ... — Michael Bentine

It is good people who make good places. — Anna Sewell

In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci") — Clark Ashton Smith

Genius loci cannot be designed to order. It has to evolve, to be allowed to hapen, to grow and change from the direct efforts of those who live and work in places and care about them...No matter how sophisticated technical knowledge may be, the understanding of others' lives and problems will always be partial. Just as outsiders cannot feel their pain, so they cannot experience their sense of place. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to make complete places in which other poeple can live. And, in a world dominated by international economic processes and global telecommunications, there can be no return to an environment of integrated and distinctive places. — Edward Relph

The soul of place is like an invisible net --or a force field -- cast up at times from within a house, neighborhood, or landscape to draw us into its labyrinthine folds. — Linda Lappin