Quotes from Hal Borland

root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food -- in some, a plant. The green substance of the earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood

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.

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life.

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of completion; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with Autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the substance of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves.... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It's a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.

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

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

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

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.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

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

Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.

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.

Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.

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.

You cn't be suspicious of a tree, accuse a bird or 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.

July is a blind date with summer.

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.

In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.