Quotes About Life

It's a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.

There was a planet that couldn't figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute. You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life? The fisherman's song flows deep under the river.

The secret of life; plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

She remembers the secret from her days onstage: Mobilize your inner will. Summon all the memory of a life lived. Hold it in your head: Right and wrong. The truth, self-evident. Nothing has more power than simple conviction.

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

He is surrounded. Even the sealed cabin around him has grown septic with life. Everything is animate, green and encroaching. Dozens of millions of species seethe around him, few of them visible, even fewer named, ready to try anything once, every possible cheat and exploitation, just to keep being.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

The postdoc turns into an adjunct position. She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.

Of course I'm ill, I'm alive aren't I?

You live between three trees.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment

A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren't shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses.