Nature & Animals Quote by Linda McCartney

There is an entire worldview packed into McCartney's conditional: "if I had the choice". It’s not a sweeping manifesto so much as a quietly stubborn preference framed against modern life’s lack of consent. The line romanticizes the horse, sure, but more pointedly it indicts the systems that make such romance impractical: highways, schedules, airports, fossil fuels, the speed-obsessed logic of postwar convenience.

As a photographer, McCartney’s imagination is visual and tactile. "Travel" here isn’t just getting from A to B; it’s the texture of the getting-there, the pace that lets you see. A horse implies slowness with dignity, a body-to-body relationship with movement. It’s also a refusal of the sealed capsule experience of cars and planes, where the world becomes background noise behind glass. Her phrasing suggests a desire to be in the landscape rather than slicing through it.

The context matters: McCartney’s public identity was entangled with a larger cultural machine (celebrity, touring, global mobility), while her private ethics leaned toward animals and a gentler, less extractive way of living. Read that way, the quote functions like a small act of protest disguised as nostalgia. It doesn’t demand anyone else change; it simply makes the present feel negotiable, as if our default settings were choices we could still revise.