Quotes About Nature

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear, she sighed, well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner.

Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

It seemed a mere toss-up whether she said, 'I love you,' or whether she said, 'I love the beech-trees,' or only 'I love—I love.

The land was so distant that no shining roof or glittering window could be any longer seen. The tremendous weight of the shadowed earth had engulfed such frail fetters, such snail-shell encumbrances. Now there was only the liquid shadow of the cloud, the buffeting of the rain, a single darting spear of sunshine, or the sudden bruise of the rainstorm. Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks.

and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on.

Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.

I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky.

The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you.

I think sometimes [...] I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn

For I am the weakest, the youngest of them all. I am a child looking at his feet and the little runnels that the stream has made in the gravel. That is a snail, I say; that is a leaf. I delight in the snails; I delight in the leaf. I am always the youngest, the most innocent, the most trustful. You are all protected. I am naked

Did nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness and acquiesced in his torture.

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The

It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green.

An open page displays lines from Cymbeline, a song of death, a lament: "'Fear no more the heat o' the sun/Nor the furious winter's rages.

Hair, pastry, tobacco — of what odds and ends are we compounded,' she said (thinking of Queen Mary's prayer-book). 'What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of dissemblables! At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.

But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look a the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.

To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing, For groves of laurel thou wert nevermeant; Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

She would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch.

The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength.