Quotes from William Bryant Logan

How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power? How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it? Science says that an acre of soil produces one horsepower every day. But you could pour gasoline all over the ground forever and never see it sprout maple trees.

We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. "It must be up there somewhere on the horizon," we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.

This is the contrary of the Darwin that we mainly receive from the Darwinists. The survival of the fittest is supposed to represent the conflict of sovereign individuals, among which the strongest wins and so gets to go on to the next round of the conflict. But in Darwin's day--at least when he was writing 'The Voyage of the Beagle'--'fittest' did not mean strongest. It meant the one that fit best into the network of mutual need

We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. 'It must be up there somewhere on the horizon,' we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.

I began to trust in the power of sprouting, and the more I learned, the more I came to believe that trees are more perceptive, more intelligent, more generous, and more persistent than we are.

The way we treat the land is the way we treat each other, and the ways of humans to each other are as ecologically important as a water table.

We would be better to focus more on acts and less on looks. Hedging puts us into the landscape intimately. It makes us pay attention. When we pay attention, we are repaid in many ways.

Beauty is the vocation of the earth.

every civilization reaches a still point. The progressives can't go forward, and the conservatives can't go back. One demands continual advance, the other longs for yesterday.

assertion of Jesus that he was the vine through whom the branches lived.

This is what the sprouts teach: immortality is not a matter of holding on, but of letting go.