"Underland" Quotes

We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star tens of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it.

The underland keeps its secrets well. Ask a hundred people where they would least like to go, and ninety-nine will tell you the same thing: down. Into the underland, into the realm of dead rivers and sunken cities, into the labyrinth of bones.

The underland is an unimagined elsewhere; a vast, dark, indifferent place, still largely unmapped and unseeable when seen.

Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

The underland is the place we go to think about endings—the deep time beneath the chronologies of above.

Memory of the underland lingers in us. The underland is vital to the material and cultural geographies we inhabit. It is where we cast everything we fear and wish to suppress.

The underland is not so innocent. It carries traces of us, and we of it. Those traces can be read. Reading such traces requires attention, patience, and practice.

The underland is a place of refuge in times of trouble. It is also a place of darkness and danger.

We are all under the earth. That is the basis for our lives, and for our deaths too.

The underland is not only a dark place, but also a place of light. The dark and the light are not opposites, but part of the same system.