Quotes About Nature

is the mountain that lends its gregarious power to the multiple elements of this place.

Yet few are as deep-rooted and damaging as the habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space—whether as a sinful plane, riddled with temptation, needing to be transcended and left behind; or a menacing region needing to be beaten and bent to our will; or simply a vaguely disturbing dimension to be avoided, superseded, and explained away.

While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world, indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants, and even landforms as expressive subjects with whom they might find themselves in conversation.

Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue.

I had rarely before paid much attention to the natural world. But my exposure to traditional magicians and seers was shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. In the course of struggling to decipher the magicians' odd gestures or to fathom their constant spoken references to powers unseen and unheard, I began to see and to hear in a manner I never had before.

along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.

It was a though we'd been living for a year in a dense grove of old trees, a cluster of firs, each with its own rhythm and character, from whom our bodies had drawn not just shelter but perhaps even a kind of guidance as we grew into a family.

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

It's weird, you know, the way so many people accept the notion that stone is inanimate, that rock doesn't move. I mean, really, this here cliff moves me every time that I see it.

The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing.

It can be difficult to accept the fact that a lot of birds have to be identified as "possible" or "probable.

What are you?" I whispered. He shrugged again. "Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.

Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity." I picked the picks from my tongue with my fingers. "Just imagine," she said. "If every seed grew, there'd be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.

I sit in my tree I sing like the birds My beak is my pen My songs are my poems.

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?" I said nothing. "What colour's a blackbird?" she said. "Black" "Typical!

We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails. We let the stars shine into us.

It's true that what can be done will be done. It's inevitable, a law of nature, and neither right nor wrong has much to do with it. The moral argument in the end is just a commentary. It doesn't control the process, or even influence it much.

even the finest examples of men and women are capable of horrific acts under the right circumstances,

has a square head. It reminds Peter of the square watermelons they grow in North Africa. They grow them in wooden crates so that as the fruit stretches out during growth it forms the shape of its container. He wonders whether Mathers was grown in a wooden crate.

I shuddered and the wind threw a couple of wet, bronze leaves at my ankles. I kicked them off

Fate whispers to the wolf; "you cannot withstand the storm" and the wolf whispers back, "I am the storm.

It was a delightful drive up to Great Falls. There were more trees than people, which is always a good sign.