Quotes About Nature

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Ecological concerns are daily news now (alas). And poets have been writing all along about stars and roses; it's not such a stretch now to bring in the Hubble telescope or dark matter or genetics.

This love is a lichen.... etching on the unmoved rock the only rune it knows.

Even dead, we bony creatures do our best to leave a mark-- if not a mask of beaten gold or a casket engraved with feathers, perhaps a richer concentration of fungus, a patch where grass is younger and thicker, a sunken place in a field.

Giraffes don't play golf.

Marriage is unnatural; only the human being would commit to something that it doesn't trust.

Plugging into a tree is like being plugged into the Sun.

The natural order of things is artificial.

The word 'natural' implies that artificiality is following an algorithm with strict fidelity.

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?

Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians--they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

A boy is a dangerous animal.

A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won't pee away.

Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement.

So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go in to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.

The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

Still, I look down, and the grass is so green, I cannot understand how it does not wither and die with sorrow. ~Song of the Sparrow

My sparrow, she flickers and wakes and sings and sings.