Quotes About Nature

The pictures were designed to soothe without arousing interest – engravings of cows in ponds, deer in streams, dogs in lakes. Wet animals seem to serve some human need.

I don't very much believe in blood," said Samuel. "I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." "You can't make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

On the fences the shiny blackbirds with red epaulets clicked their dry call. The meadowlarks sang like water, and the wild doves, concealed among the bursting leaves of the oaks, made a sound of restrained grieving.

Don't ever ask directions of a Maine native," I was told. "Why ever not?" "Somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don't smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly. It is our nature." I wonder if that is true. I could never test it, because through my own efforts I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone.

With the evening the air was so full of their song that it was a kind of roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, as after a clap of thunder, was a shocking thing…In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.

And then the leaves break out on the trees, and the petals drop from the fruit trees and carpet the earth with pink and white. The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color: cherries and apples, peaches and pears, figs which close the flower in the fruit. All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight.

Adam fluttered like a bewildered bee confused by too many flowers.

The other night I discovered that 50 feet from our house,through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael's Tor at Glastonbury...There is no question that there is magic here and all kinds of magic. (Bruton 1959)

He called his approach non-teleological thinking, or "is thinking." The term non-teleological was coined by Steinbeck's best friend, Edward F. Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy, they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to accept life on its own terms. "Is thinking" focused not on ends but on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature.

The mountains sat with their feet in the sea, and the old man's house was on the knees.

In their millions the frog songs seemed to have a beat and a cadence, and perhaps it is the ears' function to do this just as it is the eyes' business to make stars twinkle.

He stepped outside and looked up at the stars swimming in schools through the wind-driven clouds.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? [...] How if you wake up in the night and know -and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you

When two events have something in common, in their natures or in time or place, we leap happily to the conclusion that they are similar and from this tendency we create magics and store them for retelling.

But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

But from the start I had withheld from him any information about the giant redwoods. It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to Sequoia sempervirens or Sequoia gigantea might be set apart from other dogs--might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail. The concept is staggering.

You never oughta drink water when it ain't running

Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him.

THE SALINAS VALLEY is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

Now Kino lay in the cave entrance, his chin braced on his crossed arms, and he watched the blue shadow of the mountain move out across the brushy desert below until it reached the Gulf, and the long twilight of the shadow was over the land.

I've lived in a good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.