Quotes About Nature

The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn't just to show off you can get to the top, it's getting out to this wild country.

Port Allen – onde o rio é todo chuva e rosas sob uma escuridão nebulosa e insignificante, onde entramos numa estrada sinuosa sob a luminosidade amarelada da neblina, e, de repente, numa volta, vislumbramos o viscoso vulto volátil escoando suas águas sob a ponte e cruzamos outra vez a eternidade.

Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.

Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.

I felt like laughing, he loomed so funny. But the moutains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact, laughter is solemn

This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy

We went back to the barn; I made love to her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing?

All the way down the raging coast! So that when later I heard people say "Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!" I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.

We went to Old Bull Lee's house outside town near the river levee. It was on a road that ran across a swampy field. The house was a dilapidated old heap with sagging porches running around and weeping willows in the yard; the grass was a yard high, old fences leaned, old barns collapsed. There was no one in sight. We pulled right into the yard and saw washtubs on the back porch. I got out and went to the screen door.

It's all a sea, I swim out of its in the afternoons.

As I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and I knelt on the trail and said Thank you, shack. The I added Blah with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would know what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world

Cuanto más te acercas a la auténtica materia, a la piedra y al aire y al fuego y a la madera, muchacho, el mundo resulta más espiritual. Toda esa gente que se considera materialista a ultranza no sabe nada de eso. Se consideran gente práctica y tienen la cabeza llena de ideas y nociones confusas. -Levantó la mano-. Escucha esa ardilla.

Soon it got dusk, a grappy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

No hay sensación mejor en el mundo que lavarse la cara en el agua fría una mañana en la montaña.

No imaginary judgments of form, The clouds Butterfat

Las sendas son así: uno se siente flotar en el paraíso shakespeariano de Arden y cree que va a ver ninfas y pastores tocando el camarillo, cuando de repente se encuentra bajo un sol abrasador en un infierno de polvo y espinos y ortigas..., exactamente igual que la vida.

We came down off this meadow down deep into a redwood forest then up again, again so steeply that we were cursing and sweating in the dust. Trails are like that: you're floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you're struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak…just like life.

Mudface is the mud in your goatface. What would you say if someone was asked the question 'Does a dog have a Buddha nature?' and said 'Woof!

Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon,' wrote Ashvhaghosha almost two thousand years ago, 'then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world.

There's the spider in the outhouse minding his own business

Where the stars nodded on trees

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls

when they heard we were out in this country not to kill animals but just to climb mountains they took us to be hopeless eccentrics and left us alone.

here I am way below in the Vulcan's Forge itself looking up with sad eyes—Blanking my little Camel cigarette on a billion year old rock that rises behind my head to a height unbelievable—The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on the end of it, behind it the shoulders of the great sea hound cliff go rising up and back and sweeping inland higher and higher till I gasp to think "Looks like a reclining dog, big friggin shoulders on that sonofabitch