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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
--
Part I, Ch. 1

 

Willa Cather

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What is that land of hill and dale
That is so beautiful,
The land aglow with summer days,
Land with the northern lights ablaze,
Whose beauty all the seasons share,
What is that land so fair?

There many thousand lakes are bright
With twinkling stars at night
There many kanteles resound
And all around make hillsides sing
And on the golden heath firs ring:
That is the Finnish land.

 

Aleksis Kivi

 

What used to be called a Canadian novel was a kind of prairie frontier story, but it was phony. In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.

 

Robertson Davies

 

Is there a thought can fill the human mind
More pure, more vast, more generous, more refined
Than that which guides the enlightened patriot's toll:
Not he, whose view is bounded by his soil;
Not he, whose narrow heart can only shrine
The land — the people that he calleth mine;
Not he, who to set up that land on high,
Will make whole nations bleed, whole nations die;
Not he, who, calling that land's rights his pride
Trampleth the rights of all the earth beside;
No: — He it is, the just, the generous soul!
Who owneth brotherhood with either pole,
Stretches from realm to realm his spacious mind,
And guards the weal of all the human kind,
Holds freedom's banner o'er the earth unfurl'd
And stands the guardian patriot of a world!

 

Frances Wright

 

a mark ,laid upon the thousands of other layers of human and geographic history on the surface of the land.Long's comment on his 'walk' type land art

 

Richard Long

 

It was dry and cold, not bitter, but with the kind of steady chill that makes it hard to remember being any other way. I tried to imagine people living out here once, and couldn't. It must have been long ago. The land felt like it didn't want anyone bothering it anymore.

 

Michael Marshall Smith