Simon Mawer Quotes

My favourite country is Finland because once you get to a certain point, you can drive for hours without seeing a single person. I love peace and quiet - something I don't get very often.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

The fishing is a great relief for me. When I'm out there's no cell phone ringing. I'm out there fishing with bears. I'm in the middle of God's country catching tons of fish. I just absolutely love it.

I just love being in the middle of nowhere.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

It would be nice to be a bit autonomous again, to enjoy something a bit quiet.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

I find music distracting - it takes me out of my head. What I love so much about skiing is the peacefulness.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

It's beautiful being out in the wild.

My dream is to be on my boat. Or on an island. Or in my house in the country. That's my dream.

My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.

Once in a while, the universe lets you be free alone and in peace.

I love being in the woods, when I can just walk barefoot in the grass and just sit down and breathe. I love that so much.

I actually really like being in the woods.

When I was a boy, one of my favorite places to go was a pine-filled hollow high on the mountain behind our house. It was a place where the industrial song of Coalwood subsided. I would sit on a dead log and listen to nothing except the beating of my own heart and the thoughts racing through my head.

My folks have a cottage north of Kingston, which is literally in the middle of nowhere, and I can be there very happily for like a week.

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.

At Last It's a perfect winter day. No wind. No Arctic freeze. Cloudless azure sky. A day to fly. Snow drapes the mountain like ermine, fabulous feather- light powder coaxing me to flee the confines of my room, brave the mostly plowed road up to the closest ski resort. To run from the cloying silence connected Mom and Dad, into encompassing stillness far away from city dirt and noise Far above suburban gridlock. Far beyond the grasp of home.

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.

There is something about silence and being in the middle of nowhere that is really very attractive.

I get up very early in the morning. I enjoy the quietness, the stillness, the rawness in the winter and fall. It's a special time.

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!

I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.