Places

Places (or place) is a term that has a variety of meanings in a dictionary sense, but which is principally used in a geographic sense as a noun to denote location, though in a sense of a location identified with that which is located there.

Quotes

• A place where I can find out again—where I am—and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again.
  • James Baldwin in Charles E. Adelsen, "A Love Affair: James Baldwin and Istanbul", Ebony (March 1970), p. 44.

• You don't want to stand on a corner and be told to get off it when you got nowhere else to go. And we want somewhere else to go.
  • Arna Bontemps, Anyplace But Here (1966).

• The place is silent and aware;
  It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
  But that is its own affair.
  • Robert Browning, "By the Fireside", stanza 20, in Men and Women (1855).

• All places are distant from heaven alike.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part 2, Section 3, Member 4.

• Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.
  • Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871), Ch. 2.

• One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.
  • Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–1857), Book 1, Ch. 2.

• We are children of our landscape. It dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure in which we are responsive to it.
  • Lawrence Durrell, Justine (New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 41.

• Man is only an extension of the spirit of place.
  • Lawrence Durrell, Justine (New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 175.

• It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper, "I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?"
  • Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place (New York: Dutton, 1969), p. 158.

• The great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in with reverence, idly—but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.
  • Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place (New York: Dutton, 1969), p. 162.

• The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholders.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" in Essays, Second Series (1841).

• No two persons can ever see the same landscape.
  • Norman Gale, Solitude (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913), p. 45.

• I had my existence. I was there.
  Me in the place and the place in me.
  • Seamus Heaney, "A Herbal" (After Guillevic's "Herbes de Bretagne"), Human Chain (2010).

• God gave all men all earth to love,
  But since our hearts are small,
  Ordained for each one spot should prove
  Belovèd over all.
  • Rudyard Kipling, "Sussex" (1902). Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885–1918 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919), p. 244.

• Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.
  • D. H. Lawrence, "The Spirit of Place", Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).

• I have lived in a place,
  I shall die in a place,
  I have no craving for distant lands.
  But a place is nothing, not even space,
  Unless at its heart a figure stands.
  • Amy Lowell, "Thorn Piece", Ballads for Sale (1927).

• How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life.
  • Katherine Mansfield, letter to Ida Baker (March 1922) in Leslie Moore (pseudonym for Ida Baker), Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of L. M. (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), p. 184.

•     All places are alike,
  And every earth is fit for burial.
  • Christopher Marlowe, Edward II (circa 1592), Act 5, sc. 1, line 147.

• Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
  • Alice Meynell, "The Spirit of Place", The Spirit of Place and Other Essays (London: John Lane, 1899), p. 3.

• In some places you can pass through all the changes of fifty centuries in the space of five minutes. Everything is delineated, sculptured, etched. Even the waste lands have an eternal cast about them. You see everything in its uniqueness—a man sitting on a road under a tree: a donkey climbing a path near a mountain: a ship in a harbor in a sea of turquoise: a table on a terrace beneath a cloud. And so on. Whatever you look at you see as if for the first time; it won't run away, it won't be demolished overnight; it won't disintegrate or dissolve or revolutionize itself. Every individual thing that exists, whether made by God or man, whether fortuitous or planned, stands out like a nut in an aureole of light, of time and of space.
  • Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). New York: New Directions, 1958, p. 146.

• No, as with the sacred places so with the murderous spots—the record of events is written into the earth.[…] Certain spots stand out like semaphores, revealing not only the clue but the event—provided, to be sure, they are approached with utter purity of heart.
  • Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). New York: New Directions, 1958, p. 198.

• One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
  • Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 25.

• To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 162.

• Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places.
  • Alice Munro, "Face", Too Much Happiness (2009).

• Human identity presupposes the identity of place.
  • Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), p. 22.

• Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place […]. You needn't to look up at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
  • Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Ch. 10.

• Non hominis culpa, sed ista loci.
  • Translation: The fault is not of the man but of the place.
  • Ovid, Tristia, Book V (A.D. 12–13), Part vii, line 60

• Pensai a quanti luoghi ci sono nel mondo che appartengono così a qualcuno, che qualcuno ha nel sangue e nessun altro li sa.
  • Translation: I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood and no one else knows.
  • Cesare Pavese, The Devil in the Hills (1949), Ch. 9.

• Nullus locus sine genio.
  • Translation: There is no place without its spirit.
  • Servius, Commentary on Virgil's Aeneid (In Vergilii Aeneidem commentarii, late 4th century), Book 5, Section 95.

• All places that the eye of heaven visits,
  Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.
  • William Shakespeare, Richard II (1595), Act 1, sc. 3, line 275.

• A place for everything, and everything in its place.
  • Samuel Smiles, Thrift (1875), Ch. 5.

• What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
  • Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4.

• It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.
  • John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Ch. 3.

• I think there is a fatality in it; I seldom go to the place I set out for.
  • Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), "The Address. Versailles".

• One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew.[…] Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, 'miching mallecho.'
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Gossip on Romance", Longman's Magazine 1:1 (November 1882); reprinted in Memories and Portraits (1887).
  • The phrase "miching mallecho", meaning "sneaky or skulking mischief", is from Shakespeare's Hamlet, III, ii, 148.

• Nothing will tell you
  where you are.
  Each moment is a place
  you've never been.
  • Mark Strand, "Black Maps", Darker (1970).

• 'Space' is more abstract than 'place'. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.
  • Yi-Fu Tuan, Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 6.

•   Geniumque loci, primamque Deorum
  Tellurem, Nymphasque, et adhuc precatur
  Numina.
  • Translation: He prays to the spirit of the place, and to Earth, the first of the gods, and to the Nymphs and as yet unknown rivers.
  • Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book 7, line 136.

• "A jolly place," said he, "in times of old,
  But something ails it now; the spot is curse'd."
  • William Wordsworth, "Hart-leap Well", Part 2, in Lyrical Ballads (1800), Vol. II.

• There is nothing more fragile than the balance of beautiful places.
  • Marguerite Yourcenar, note (1958) in "Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian", Memoirs of Hadrian (1951).

See also

For particular geographic places, i.e. countries or cities, see Category:Places.