Geographical Impact Quotes

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.

I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

My old songs used to take place in Gothenburg; then, when I lived in Melbourne, the songs just naturally took place more in Melbourne.

The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.

I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.

Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries.

It just so happens that I was born and raised in Washington. Had I been born in Chicago or San Antonio, the streets and places would have figured into whatever I wrote. Just so happens that it's Washington, D.C.

Great influence has at all times been ascribed to climate... [but] we have abundance of proof that [differences of climate] are entirely inadequate to account for the differences between the different races of men.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

I'd never have written the big books in London.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea.

I grew up watching British television because I lived so close to Canada.

We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past.

Audiences aren't that different for my show from area to area. Other acts, I think, experiences differences, but not me.

That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.