Quotes About Nature

Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America

While you're at it, get that straight in your own head, too. You want peace, quiet, wildlife, scenery, wild trout, and you don't expect miracles

Charles Waterman, Gerald Almy

Once the runoff comes down in a normal year, the online readout from the gauging stations forms a gentle wave: up slightly at night as the day's snowmelt reaches the gauge and down slightly during the day to reflect the cold, high-elevation nights. It looks like the slow heartbeat of a large animal at rest, disturbed only by the occasional thunderstorm.

To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible.

The moment of twilight is simply beautiful.

Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.

mistake. If he gives up the cave (and denies his true nature) he becomes irritable, overly sensitive, defensive, weak, passive, or mean. And to make matters worse, he doesn't know why he has become so unpleasant.

For people in thrall to 'mortality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must.

Contemporary culture rejects the idea of nature for the same reason it rejects the idea of God. Both set limits on the human will.

Ricky had taught me a few cuss words. I usually practiced them in the woods by the river, then prayed for forgiveness as soon as I was done.

Appalachia was Appalachia, regardless of boundaries someone had set an eternity ago. A land of breathtaking beauty, of steep hills and rolling mountains

I can feel the competition here, very much like the first few weeks of law school when we were terribly concerned with each other's initial progress. I nod at a few acquaintances, silently hoping they flunk the exam because they're silently hoping I Collapse too. Such is the nature of the profession.

Such is the nature of my daily reading. I haven't had the luxury of finishing a novel in years.

The M'Naghten Rule states: To establish a defense on the ground of insanity it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

The trees thinned just before the crumbling

Not long after Vayden left, there was a big rain, and a flood. Because the creeks and rivers are choked off, the water is diverted to other runoffs. Flooding is a huge problem, to say the least. An avalanche of mud and trees and topsoil swept through the valley and took out the Gray home. Crushed it and scattered it for miles downstream. Fortunately, no one was in the house; by then it was uninhabitable, not even Webster could stay

had been the marigold turning to face the sun.

the keeper of the royal aviaries released some seven hundred goldfinches and other songbirds

a garden some forty feet away, on the other side of the town wall

His troops forded the River Esk at low tide. When they returned, it was high tide

violent gale blew up.

It is difficult to think of the "natural world" as sacred (because we just designated it "natural").

So, in what we considered the true spirit of freedom and the timeless nature of our travel plans, a few months after the sacrifice of Dave's airline ticket, the three of us ceremoniously burnt our watches, too.