‘The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.’
(Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit)
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
(‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ by Wallace Stevens)
'A walk is just one more layer, a mark,
laid upon the thousands of other layers of
human and geographical history on the
surface of the land. Maps help to show this.’
'A walk traces the surface of the land,
it follows an idea, it follows the day
and the night.’
(Richard Long, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 1980)
'What justification is there for comparing a poem with a walk rather than with something else? I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal. Poets not only do a lot of walking but talk about it in their poems: 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ 'Now I out walking,’ and 'Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day.’ There are countless examples, and many of them suggest that both the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an inward seeking. The walk magnified is the journey, and probably no figure has been used more often than the journey for both the structure and concern of an interior seeking.’
(‘A Poem is a Walk’, A.R. Ammons)
A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.
(Paul Klee)