Quotes About Nature

It doesn't help an animal to cry when it's in pain. But it does it.

The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees.

Plantation justice was mean and constant but the world was indiscriminate. Out in the world, the wicked escaped comeuppance and the decent stood in their stead at the whipping tree. Tennessee's disasters were the fruit of indifferent nature, without connection to the crimes of the homesteaders. To how the Cherokee had lived their lives.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day.

Everything in the garden is dying, that's what time of year it is. The leaves blaze and desiccate in their dying before twisting to the ground as ash.

Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.

scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and

tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary.

The moon grew fat and thin, there were solstices, first frosts and spring rains. All these things proceeded without the interference of men. She tried to imagine what the tide looked like, coming in and going out, nipping at the sand like a little dog, heedless of people and their machinations. Her strength returned.

On nights when Tom Bird felt separate from his life's design, he shared stories of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit lived in all things—the earth, the sky, the animals and forests—flowing through and connecting them in a divine thread.

On the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. She was free. This moment. She had to go back.

rare frost that morning, the wind howling

of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

The sky was a sheet of slate but it was still warm, an August afternoon that let you know its kind was running out.

It had been a cool dawn. Wisps of white moisture hovered over the ground.

When he heard autumn leaves skuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle.

In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.

Make the letters blockier, so you can see it, put some red in there. He read an article that said red was a color favored by nature to make animals take notice, and you had to be part animal to live in New York City. Made sense to use red in signs, Pepper thought. But no one was asking him.

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

Even angels are animals.

The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murderers, dormant rapists, and latent fascists were now free to express their ruthless natures. The congenitally timid, those who had been stingy with their dreams for themselves, those who came out of the womb scared and remained so: These, too, found a final stage for their weakness and in their last breaths were fulfilled. I've always been like this. Now I'm more me.

If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It's like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she's just giving it her all, she's singing just for you, she's on fire...and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.

The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.