Quotes & Sayings About The Sierras

My ties and ballasts leave me - I travel - I sail - My elbows rest in the sea-gaps. I skirt the sierras. My palms cover continents - I am afoot with my vision. — Walt Whitman

I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. Columbus is coming from the Indies as a prisoner to Cadiz. — Christopher Columbus

west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. — Gregory Benford

The Long March The Red Army is not afraid of hardship on the march, the long march. Ten thousand waters and a thousand mountains are nothing. The Five Sierras meander like small waves, the summits of Wumeng pour on the plain like balls of clay. Cliffs under clouds are warm and washed below by the River Gold Sand. Iron chains are cold, reaching over the Tatu River. The far snows of Minshan only make us happy and when the army pushes through, we all laugh. October 1935 — Mao Zedong

Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the outdoors. When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day. — Tom Hanks

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again. — Cormac McCarthy

We stock up on popcorn and candy like we're crossing the Sierras, don't we? I'll have a couple of soft pretzels, a hot dog, Milk Duds, Snocaps. Is that the largest popcorn you've got there, that bucket? You don't have a barrel or anything like that? Do you have a donkey or a pack mule or anything? - Oh, and a Diet Coke. — Ellen DeGeneres

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. — Aldo Leopold

It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to workour mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known. — Henry David Thoreau

Which didn't explain why Brant remained outside with Elizabeth, even when he started to suffer from heatstroke. Or maybe heatstroke was only the excuse he used for what happened next. With one eye pinned on Elizabeth, he stripped off his shirt, something he rarely did, and proceeded to perform feats of strength. He moved large rocks for no good reason, grunting as if he were leg-pressing a good five hundred pounds. He welded hedge clippers like Edward Scissorhands. And hoed like a lumberjack bent on clearing the Sierras.

It was heatstroke. It had to be. There was no other way to explain a thirty-eight-year-old man flexing and posing for a woman like some goddamned body builder in a competition.

And the worst part about it was she didn't even pay him the slightest bit of attention. — Katie Lane

He had gone to the higher Sierras ... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death] — John Muir