Norman MacCaig Quotes

I just love being in the middle of nowhere.

If someone said, 'Think of a happy place for you,' I'd say a glacial plane near the South Pole, the wind howling, nobody in sight, a shack with a pot-belly stove and some tea.

There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.

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.

I just go in my back garden. It's the only place where people don't come and bother you.

I usually find myself hiking in a place that not a lot of people go hiking, just trying to find some solitude. I like being out in the middle of nowhere. Not always, but it's a good place to go to just reflect and think, and it's something I really enjoy.

I actually really like being in the woods.

I've always loved the woods, and I've always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.

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

Silence is best.

I like fishing. Not actual fishing - I like the peace and quiet of being at sea. It's different.

I like to take walks in the park by myself, where no one can bother me and I can think.

But Portugal has a peaceful feel about it. I sit on the terrace overlooking the vineyard there and I feel cut off from the world. You need that sort of thing.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

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.

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.

There's something about the darkness that I find unavoidably intoxicating. The knowledge that other people are sleeping and, therefore, unavailable to ruin my solitude, makes me more peaceful than I am during the day.

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

Anywhere which is in a forest, that's my zen place.

There is such a peace out in the middle of the desert. There's nothing like it.

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.

her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.

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.

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep,-- Nature's observatory--whence the dell, In flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.