Quotes About Nature

and then the dawn, pink as salmon meat, buttery. Daylight.

in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be.

June is spring, July is summer, August is autumn, and everything else is winter.

Wild. That's how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it's all the same to me. Alaska doesn't attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can't live anywhere else.

them up. Flowers blooming. A garden Ã¢â'¬Â¦ As she neared the house, the front door opened. A woman came out, wearing a pretty floral-print dress beneath a frilly red apron, and holding a broom. Her bobbed hair was carefully curled and a pair of wireless glasses magnified her eyes.

Up here, in the vastness of Alaska, the words sounded infinitesimal and small. A fist shaken at the gods.

Some years June is spring, July is summer, August is autumn, and everything else is winter.

That spring, rain fell in great sweeping gusts that rattled the rooftops. Water found its way into the smallest cracks and undermined the sturdiest foundations. Chunks of land that had been steady for generations fell like slag heaps on the roads below, taking houses and cars and swimming pools down with them.

They were standing at the top of a mountain, on a wide patch of flat land. Far below lay a vast swath of farmland, fields of green. Great rectangles of brown, newly tilled earth. "California," Ant said. Elsa had never seen land so beautiful. So fertile. So green. California. The Golden State.

The waters of the past were as cold as she'd expected, even in the heat of this gorgeous summer morning.

Your mama told me that if a girl grows up smelling sea air, she can never really breathe inland.

But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn't change its essential nature.

Like geese," she whispered into the tiny, shell-pink ear, "their babies imprint on the mama in the first sighting and never forget.

Some things in life, though, couldn't be gone in search of. They simply had to be waited for. Like the weather. You could look out on the horizon and see a bank of black storm clouds. That did not guarantee rain tomorrow. It might just as easily dawn bright and clear. There was no damn way to tell. All you could do was keep moving and live you life.

was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.

Soon, the crops would be planted. By July, the corn would be as tall as a man and go on forever. By October, the leaves would be brownish gold and thin as paper,and when the early winter winds came, the rustling stalks would sound like a hive of bees. That was the cycle of the land, the measure of time. Everything in her daddy's world had been tacked to seasons. Things came and went and lived and died according to sunlight.

Leni looked around. The beauty of this place, the majesty of it, was overwhelming. A deep and abiding peace existed here; there were no human voices, no thumping footsteps, no laughter or engines running. The natural world spoke loudest here, the breathing of the tide across the rocks, the slap of water on the float plane's pontoons, the distant barking of sea lions lumped together on a rock, being circled by chattering gulls.

Someone said to me once that Alaska didn't create character; it revealed it.

When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It's human nature. And raht now, that's us. In California it used to be the Mexicans, and the Chinese before that, I think.

White sheets flapped in the breeze and roses tumbled like laughter along the ancient stone wall that hid her property from the road.

Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep. This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Aw. Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep.

Ah, a nightingale.