Quotes About Nature

Humans are animals, too," he told me. "If a vampire kills a human, then yes, he is evil. But one who just takes a little blood to fill his rumbling belly … where is the harm in that?

Life would be much simpler if I abandoned my humanity and ran wild with them, gave myself over to animalistic pleasures, free of the burdens of duty and responsibility.

What you're saying is that there's no point worrying about the past, because we can't change it? Basically, she nodded, then leant over, one green eye shining brightly, one brown eye gleaming dully. A mortal can drive himself mad thinking about the nature of the universal puzzle. Concern yourself only with the problems of the present and you will get along fine.

That's wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he's looking out for himself. Don't we all? I don't trust a man that says he's not. And the man that's telling the truth when he says he's not I distrust most of all, because he's and ass and an ass that's going contrary to the laws of nature.

Character: our habitual way of operating. HOW we are is WHO we are!

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.

Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.

A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ.

Of course most of us find it difficult to talk about insects without bringing up the subject of sex.

I was clinging to this tree so passionately that I might very well have committed an act of photosynthesis with it.

AS A PROFESSIONAL HUMORIST, I OFTEN GET LETTERS from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. "What kind of a sick, perverted, disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask, "that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?

Nevertheless, we do need insects, for they perform many useful functions. Without insects, for example, we would have no reliable way to spread certain diseases.

Are the kids at school? No, they're in the lake. My God.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard. It shifts and our cities fall; it sighs and the coasts are overtaken.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.

He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys whoa re part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake.

Animals howl, he had been told, to declare their existence.

At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.

This was Josie's preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little.

In the forest, we boys were food.

Every day some scientist discovered a new species of frog or waterlily, and that, too, seemed to confirm some divine showman, some celestial inventor putting new toys before us, hidden but hidden poorly, just where we might happen upon them.