Quotes About Nature

you get forests of almond and walnut trees, casting shade as cool as a well, thick battalions of spear-like cypress and silver-trunked fig trees with leaves as large as a salver.

Up in the hills, in the miniature forests of heather and broom, where the sun-warmed rocks were embossed with strange lichens

The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship's engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.

the whole thing guarded by a tall, thick hedge of fuchsias that rustled mysteriously with birds.

As we left the road and made our way up the hillside through the olive groves sparkling with light and shade, coloured with a hundred wild flowers, I stopped to pick some anemones for Mother. While I gathered the wine-coloured flowers

I lay in the garden in the shade of the tangerine trees and devoured the book

Are we having a plague of owls?' Larry inquired. 'Are they attacking the larder and zooming out with bunches of chops in their talons?

Roger and I would squat in the sweet-scented myrtles and lay bets with each other as to whether or not, on this particular morning, George was going to fight an olive tree.

dropped in on my old shepherd friend Yani who provided us with some bread and fig cake and a straw hat full of wild strawberries to sustain us.

The warm air smelled of the day's sunshine, of dew, and of a hundred aromatic leaf scents.

you reached a small half-moon bay, rimmed with white sands and great piles of dried ribbon-weed that had been thrown up by the winter storms and lay along the beach like large, badly made birds' nests.

Roger and I would make our way down through the breathless olive groves, vibrating with the cries of the cicadas, and pad our way along the dusty road, Roger sneezing voluptuously as his great paws stirred up the dust, which went up his nose like snuff.

shiny ribbon-weed, looking like dark feather boas, anchored to the sand

to bring us a handful of figs from his tree or a few almonds, milky and fresh, which we would crack between the smooth stones on the beach.

The myrtle forests were full of mantises some three inches long, with vivid green wings. They would sway through the myrtle branches on their slender legs, their wickedly barbed front arms held up in an attitude of hypocritical prayer, their little pointed faces with their bulbous straw-coloured eyes turning this way and that, missing nothing, like angular, embittered spinsters at a cocktail party.

Here Sally's hooves crushed the herbs underfoot and the warm air became redolent with the scent of sage and thyme.

It seemed to me, in the gloom, that the flowers had moved closer to her, had crowded eagerly about her bed, as though waiting for her to tell them something. A ravaged old queen, lying in state, surrounded by her whispering court of flowers.

fluffy oak trees.

It had a tremendously wide head with golden eyes and a sulky, pouting mouth.

It looked immensely sure of itself as it lay there, flamboyant, on the sand, and immensely dangerous, too.

Progress,' said Audrey shortly....'It's important to destroy [nature] so we can have more electricity so that we can then have colour television to show us what the world is really like.

Eventually the warm wind and the rain of winter seemed to polish the sky, so that when January arrived it shone a clear, tender blue … the same blue as that of the tiny flames that devoured the olive logs in the charcoal pits. The nights were still and cool, with a moon so fragile it barely freckled the sea with silver points. The dawns were pale and translucent until the sun rose, mist-wrapped, like a gigantic silkworm cocoon, and washed the island with a delicate bloom of gold dust.

and the olive trunks steamed as the rain was dried off them by the sun

Then I got out of bed to have a look and I found that poor rose, crushed in the middle of them, being harried to death. I got him out and put him by himself and gave him half an aspirin. Aspirin is so good for roses. Drachma pieces for the chrysanthemums, aspirin for roses, brandy for sweet peas, and a squeeze of lemon-juice for the fleshy flowers, like begonias.