Quotes About Nature

She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame.

Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won't surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.

I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.

Blue Juneberry, tough diamond willow.

She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.

Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.

He peppered his talk with references to his forgiving nature.

Rockefeller remained a country boy at heart

It was his own Walden, a place where "fine views invest the soul and where we can live simply and quietly.

As in the American south, an exaggerated sense of romantic honor may have been an unconscious way for slaveholders to flaunt their moral superiority, purge pent-up guilt, and cloak the brutish nature of their trade.

As he watched people scheme and grovel for Rockefeller's fortune, it was hard to preserve his faith in human nature.

The issue is much more complicated than that, but there's no doubt that Rockefeller's achievement arose from the often tense interplay between the two opposing, deeply ingrained tendencies of his nature—his father's daring and his mother's prudence—yoked together under great pressure.

Animals never cry. They don't go to pieces and call somebody and go through a box of Kleenex an hour.

Then it became clear that it was a song, the loneliest sort of song because the notes changed so little, like one bird calling and waiting for another to answer. It was as lonely a sound as she'd ever heard.

He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.

petrichord: the sound of water sliding over smooth stone.

The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree.

a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.

A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.

Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?

It was the kind of early-fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet fallen--a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger.

a day so perfect that the earth itself seemed sorry to let it pass, so slowed down its roll into evening and let it linger.

An over-sensitive person in the country is always a strain.