Quotes About Nature

Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it...

It's a beautiful day" – by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, "The weather's good," "The weather's pleasant." We say, "It's a beautiful day," "What a beautiful day.

I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade.

Howling, are you?" the Indian said. "There it is for you, then. That's what happens, that's what they say: There's not a wolf alive that can't tame a man.

The coyotes sounded like hurt dogs. They agitated plainly for Christ's return. May they not be heard.

It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patientyl, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. The summer's over, I said.

The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, whilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn't even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another's butts.

It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among the rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

the downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts.

One small, orange flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in it's own distances.

Only farmers and the young, who live dependent upon change, understand what it is to know the continual flowering of life, however subtle.

The soles of her feet were summer-tough, numb to the jagged shells and bits of pinecone.

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.

An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. "You see that?" "Yeah. It's gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, 'Wait a second. This isn't right.' "'I'm supposed to be over there.' "'Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.

It's the sea, some men take to it. Some men it takes.

The sun was beginning to fade, though, and the air - slightly chilled as it slid through the trees - carried with it just the barest hint of rain.

Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.

Montooth squared himself, his eyes suddenly clear. "You heard the earth's mostly water, right?" Joe nodded. "And people think God lives up in the sky, but that don't never make much sense to me because the sky is way, way up there, not part of us, you know?" "But the ocean?" Joe said. "That's the skin of the world. And I think God lives in the drops. Moves through a wave like the foam itself. I look

Dio ama la violenza. Tu capisci, non è così? Altrimenti perché ce ne sarebbe così tanta? La violenza è dentro di noi. Sgorga da noi. È la cosa che ci viene più naturale, prima ancora di respirare. Noi scateniamo guerre. Pratichiamo sacrifici. Saccheggiamo e straziamo le carni dei nostri fratelli. Riempiamo campi immensi di morti, della loro puzza. E perché? Per mostrare a Lui che abbiamo imparato dal Suo esempio.

God was not some white-robed cloud king prone to sentimental meddling in human affairs. He was the iron that formed its core, and the fire in the belly of the blast furnaces that ran for a hundred years. God was the law of iron and the law of fire. God was nature and nature was God. There could not be one without the other.

Soft waves broke against the rocks.