Quotes About Nature

It's so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices. It's hopeless. She might as well be one of those gannets, tossed about by the gusts of wind that drive up from the Atlantic.

Flight is not the astonishing thing. I have always thought that the miracle of birds is not that they fly, but that they touch down.

All those days of walking the heath, collecting her specimens, reinforced in her a need to look to the natural world for her own location. Now, even in London, she is constantly searching out the trees and grass, the flowers, to determine her position in the urban landscape. She looks to the natural world to guide her in how she moves through the city, in how she thinks about her own life.

If there's no apparent reason for something to change, then why does it change? Is it a dog's nature to vary behaviour when life becomes too comfortable? Is it ours?

The stars wire the sky together and the crickets fill the shadows of the earth with their breath.

we catch a glimpse of white fur flashing by inside the bars of the woods.

Each little flower has a history and cultural references, is a superstition or a cure for something.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.n

What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!

No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

The windows were wide open,

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive systems.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.

The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.

Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.

The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends.

There's a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.