Quotes About Nature

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.

I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity.

L'integrità è un valore neutro. Anche le iene hanno una loro integrità. Sono iene allo stato puro.

A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.

Once a killer, always a killer.

Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.

It was as if the bones and veins were working their way to the surface; as if the skin were water receding to expose shapes at the bottom of a harbor.

AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL.

Laat op de avond, als het verkeer op de snelweg eindelijk bedaarde, leken de dennen achter het woonhuis waarachtig te fluisteren.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

Per me, - disse Walter, - la differenza è che gli uccelli uccidono perché devono mangiare. Non lo fanno con rabbia, non lo fanno senza motivo. Non è una cosa nevrotica. Per me è questo che rende la natura un luogo pacifico. Le cose vivono o non vivono, ma non esiste il veleno del risentimento, della nevrosi e dell'ideologia. È un sollievo dalla mia rabbia nevrotica

El sol bajo, en el cielo: luminaria menor, estrella enfriándose. Ráfagas de desorden, sucesivas. Árboles inquietos, temperaturas en descenso

He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry.

Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe.

Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.

Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal

La differenza è che gli uccelli uccidono solo perché devono mangiare. Non lo fanno con rabbia, non lo fanno senza motivo. Non è una cosa nevrotica. Per me è questo che rende la natura un luogo pacifico. Le cose vivono o non vivono, ma non esiste il veleno del risentimento, della nevrosi e dell'ideologia. È un sollievo dalla mia rabbia nevrotica.

He ate arugula ("rocket," the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.