Quotes About Nature

But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn't lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn't sick at the sunset.

All we've got left to protect here is a system that's set up to promote the meanest possibilities in human nature and make them look good.

You and I doctor, on the beach.

The sky was a deep gray-blue, banded with the colors of rust seen under water.

There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn't put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they'd seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.

He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.

Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky. They made a lot of nature shows there.

Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it. (When asked what will save humanity.)

He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun.

and his voice the cry of a bird unknown, 3Jane answering in song, three notes, high and pure. A true name.

and he lived in the trailer down by the creek.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn't you?' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble...

He knelt among the shadows and felt his isolation bitterly. They were savages it was true; but they were human.

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!

The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.

Are we savages or what?

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock.