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Quotes About Nature

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
~ Julian Barnes
life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.
~ Julian Barnes
It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.
~ Julian Barnes
Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.
~ Julian Barnes
And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
~ Julian Barnes
Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.
~ Julian Barnes
love might or might not promote kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. such was love's nature. of course, it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as a spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel.
~ Julian Barnes
One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes—a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.
~ Julian Barnes
Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.
~ Julian Barnes
I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies of her splayed beneath me or arched above me. Daily intimacy made me proud of knowing about make-up, clothes policy, the feminine razor, and the mystery and consequences of a woman's periods. I found myself envying this regular reminder of something so wholly female and defining, so connected to the great cycle of nature.
~ Julian Barnes
Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too
~ Julian Barnes
Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.
~ Julian Barnes
I was deeply misled by Lady Chatterley's Lover, which seemed to insist that running naked through damp undergrowth with wild flowers entwined in your pubic hair was just about the closest thing to heaven.
~ Julian Barnes
The pigs and sheep you see walking around today are zombies compared to their effervescent ancestors on the Ark. They've had the stuffing knocked out of them. And some of them, like the turkey, have to endure the further indignity of having the stuffing put back into them – before they are braised or boiled.
~ Julian Barnes
One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.
~ Julian Barnes
They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.
~ Julian Barnes
Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.
~ Julian Barnes
But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.
~ Julian Barnes
El amor, por su propia naturaleza, era perturbador, cataclísmico; y, si no, no era amor.
~ Julian Barnes
We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.
~ Julian Barnes
Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.
~ Julian Barnes
She was right off that scale, stranger; hurricane force nine was a gentle breeze where she came from.
~ Julian Barnes
Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day's hiking.
~ Julian Barnes
Weet je wat het is - de natuur is heel precies, het doet precies zoveel pijn als het waard is, dus beleef je in zekere zin, denk ik, genoegen aan de pijn. Als het er niet toe deed, zou het er niet toe doen.
~ Julian Barnes