Quotes About Nature

I was feeling right at home all by myself. The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree and not peek out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall willows along the irrigation ditch out back

I've been lucky to spend a life pretty close to the earth up here in the north. I learned in those three days that the earth is so much more than I ever thought it was. It was a gift indeed to see all sides of everything at once. This makes it real hard to say good-bye. My family will be with me just like that old raven falling slowly down through the tree.

How could all this happen when there was an ocean?

Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us.

I hadn't noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black.

What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what: not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold snowy willows, garishly green and yellow What could it be, this astonishment, but falling into a liquid mirror to finally understand that the purpose of earth is earth? It's plain as night. She's willing to sleep with us a little while.

In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It's safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there's a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.

You live in a beautiful place and you don't act like you know it.

I did not want to live out my life in the strennous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tic-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foilbles...

To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.

Un ordinateur portable est fondamentalement un bâton utilisé par un chimpanzé pour faire sortir les délicieuses fourmis hors d'un trou dans une bûche.

I began walking at your age just because the natural world seemed to absorb the poison in me.

They merged again one evening sitting on the porch swing watching fireflies and the thousands of stars above them, idly moving the swing back and forth with their feet. The night was unbearably beautiful with the constellations speaking their own strange language to each other. He told her he thought it might be the uninvented language used by Jesus and the Buddha to speak to each other.

Back when I was young and still alive there were almost too many gods. You could see them ripple in the water before the lake's ice melted in April, the loons and curlews giving them voice.

However grim the world, we are what we have evolved into.

There are no true monsters, only some people [...] who with regularity acted like a monster. It's still episodic. [...] It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture.

Work could be anything that aroused your curiosity: the natural world, music, anthropology, the stars, or even sewing or gardening. When we were little girls we would invent dresses the Queen of Egypt might wear, or have a special garden where we ordered seeds for vegetables or flowers we had never heard of.

If you dive down deep enough there are no words to bring you up. Not my problem. If you fly too high there are no words to help you land. I went back to my land of bears and learned to bob like an apple on the river's surface.

I saw a doe and a fawn but Sonia chased them away, roaring as if they meant us harm. I rehearsed my entire life and I heard my heart for the first time. In the morning I had fantasies of love and laughter, even creating the image of Duane and my father riding horseback up the drawn toward me.

A sonic boom crushes a baby mink's skull. We know that. Isn't it enough?

A creek is more powerful than despair.

The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.