Everett Ruess Quotes

Always I shall be one who loves the wilderness:
Swaggers and softly creeps between the mountain peaks; I shall listen long to the sea’s brave music; I shall sing my song above the shriek of desert winds.

I’m drunk on the fiery elixer of beauty.

I have been in many beautiful places, and did not wish to taste, but to drink deep.

Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;
That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;
Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;
Lonely and wet and cold, but that I kept my dream!

I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. why muck and conceal one’s true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?

I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.

Always, I want to live more intensely and richly.

I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.

While I am alive, I intend to live.

But then, I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.