The short answer: yes, John Muir wrote “the mountains are calling and I must go”, in a letter from Yosemite Valley to his sister Sarah Muir Galloway, dated 3 September 1873. So the name on the poster is right. The sentence is not finished. Muir kept writing, and the words that follow change what he…
Search nature quotes and page one hands you lists of hundreds of lines over a photo of a misty lake. Almost none of them tell you which book a line came from, and a few of the most shared ones were never written by the person whose name sits under them. So every numbered line…
Search “into the wild quotes” and you get a single undifferentiated list. Krakauer sentences, McCandless postcards, Thoreau, Jack London, Tolstoy and lines written by Sean Penn in 2007 all sit under one heading with one credit. That is not a small tidiness problem. It is the difference between something a dying man wrote on a…
Alice in Wonderland quotes are some of the most misquoted in English, and the reason is almost sweet. Carroll’s real sentences are so quotable that a paraphrase of one still sounds like him. So the paraphrases spread, pick up a name, and end up on a mug. This page takes the other approach. Both Alice…
There is one sentence everybody quotes about wilderness, and almost everybody gets a single word wrong. Thoreau wrote “in Wildness is the preservation of the World”. Wildness, not wilderness. The version on the posters swaps a state of being for a place on a map, which is close to the reverse of what he was…
Search “fishing quotes” and page one gives you two quote aggregators, a Goodreads tag, a Reddit thread and three fishing blogs. Between them they do not attach a source to a single line. Not one. Google’s own answer box opens with “a bad day of fishing is always better than a good day at work”…
Search sunset quotes and you get the same forty lines in a different order, half of them credited to “Unknown” and the rest to a name that leads to another quote page rather than to a book. The page sitting second in those results right now credits two different lines to Claude Debussy, neither with…
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