“I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit.”
— Barry López, American author

“Beautiful doesn’t begin to describe it. A flower is beautiful. But this is beautiful the way that a person is beautiful – terrifying with its jagged edges, yet seductive with its crevices that hide so many secrets.”
— Jeri Smith-Ready, author

“I can still remember my first experience standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking into it. It was so awesome. It took a fair amount of restraint to prevent me from jumping into it, because I was certain I could fly.”
— Mark Goulston, UCLA professor of psychiatry

“The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself.”
— John Wesley Powell, American geologist

“It is a spectacular illusion – a deeply three-dimensional scene flattened onto an earthly canvas.”
— Stefanie Payne, author

“Well, once you’ve been in the Canyon and once you’ve sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends…it’s always been a fascinating place to me, in fact I’ve often said that if I ever had a mistress, it would be the Grand Canyon.”
— Barry Goldwater, U.S. senator from Arizona

“In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, American conservationist and 26th president of the United States

“I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens. What any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.”
— Barry López, American author

“There will never be a photograph of the Grand Canyon that can adequately describe its depth, breadth, and true beauty.”
— Stefanie Payne, author

“You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.”
— John Wesley Powell, American geologist

”If there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim-that is the paramount goal.”
— Kevin Fedarko, author

“It’s not at all naturally human to see something like the Grand Canyon as beautiful.”
— David Roberts, American mountaineer and author