Quotes from Hal Borland

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason.

All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.