Quotes About Nature

The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images—because that is the essential nature of the medium.

Jews according to the Chief Rabbinate. These debates recall once again the dynamic nature of Jewish identity, so variable because of the constant movement of Jews from locale to

It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

We do not organize education the way we see the world. If we did, we would have departments of Sky, Landscapes, Water, Wind, Sounds, Time Seashores, Swamps, and Rivers.

This sloughing off and scouring down to the walls is about a denial that has little to do with doing without. It is not so much the forging of one's fleshly desires as much as a terrified repudiation of the essential nature of what we are: great sloshing, suppurating bags of wet, prone to rupture. Mortal messes just waiting to happen.

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of jazz as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

I see you that have a little swimming mouse

But songbirds are trash, the chicken said, and the guinea hen laughed, saying, Well, then, I guess we could all use a little more trash in our lives.

It made no sense naturewise—owls and songbirds work different shifts, and even if they didn't they would still never be friends.

When young, the animals were sweet. Then one day they became moody and violent, like human teenagers

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.

Given all the time I've spent in the country, you'd think I might have seen a calf being born, but this was a first for me. The biggest surprise was how nonplussed the expectant mother was. For a while she lay flat on the grass, panting. Then she got up and began grazing, still with those feet sticking out. "Really?" I said to her. "You can't go five minutes without eating?

On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn't that what we've all been waiting for?

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don't. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.

It's beautiful, the Atlantic, but at the same time so insistent, always advancing, always taking what it wants.

Eternally Weeps the Groundhog.

She couldn't swim, but enjoyed standing at the water's edge with a pole in her hand. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fishing, as she caught nothing and expressed neither hope nor disappointment in regard to her efforts. What she thought about while looking at the waves was a complete mystery, yet you could tell that these thoughts pleased her, and that she liked herself better while thinking them.

the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to man—man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. All things are connected.125

Give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.

The background was the peculiarly egalitarian nature of Germanic social structure and political values which the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain.

Amemos la carne porque mañana será carroña.

Fat flakes of snow fell like silent, feathery ghosts in the windless sub-arctic night beyond the window.