Quotes About Nature

Jonathan Franzen

It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else—like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting social question.

And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

I believe that the wilderness is where God is found.

Two turtles dressed in their shells. This

The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

The whole state of Maine is unlocked.

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

Try to be one of the people," said Henry James, "on whom nothing is lost." As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes

It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

only someone who'd never been an animal would put up a sign saying not to feed them....

And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don't have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed shirt?

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.

My dream went all the way back to the beginning. The rain rose into the clouds, and the animals descended the ramp.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water.

The horse at the bottom of the river, shrouded by the sunken night sky, closed its heavy eyes. The prehistoric ant in Yankel's ring, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored amber since long before Noah hammered the first plank, hid its head between its many legs, in shame.

Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so.