Quotes About Nature

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level:

Remember... It's a jungle out there!

The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane.

THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.

The Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie's famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long.

It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.

There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West Montana come to mind, and perhaps the 'Glades still offer hope to those who wish to resign from modern times. The other place is the Atchafalaya Basin.

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

But the rain gods went away. They ain't coming back, either." "How do you know that?" "They got no reason to. We don't believe in them no more.

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I

Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn't know why.

The air smelled like Bayou Teche when is spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in cattails and the flooded cypress.

each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky.

It's funny what can happen when you lay bare the heart and join the Earth's old dance through the heavens.

I wished life consisted of just taking care of animals, the earth, and one's family and friends. In fact, that's what it should be. But it's not, and the explanation for that fact is not one I have ever been able to provide.

Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it's waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it's your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it.

He was riding back through a doorway in time to a place that had nothing to do with the airplanes, and motorized vehicle and telephones wires, and radios that surrounded him now....... The woods in late autumn had become his private sun dappled cathedral, one that contained presences antithetical to the conventional notion of a church.

THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise.

James Lee Burke

this area, most

The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.

The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life. Except in this case, the presence on

speculation on the nature of creation is a luxury reserved for scholars. The rest of us have to deal with one another and ferret our way through the snares and pitfalls that we create for our fellow man.

The air was bright with a clean, cold smell like dark water dipped out of a rain barrel in winter, perhaps a harbinger that the gifts of the earth are many, all of them waiting to be discovered.