Quotes About Nature

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live...

Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

He's eating God the way a bear eats meat against the winter.

The desert, being an unwanted place, might well be the last stand of life against unlife. For in the rich and moist and wanted areas of the world, life pyramids against itself and in its confusion has finally allied itself with the enemy non-life.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.

It's a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man's life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

But in my little experience the end is never very different in its nature from the means. Damn it, Jim, you can only build a violent thing with violence.

A blanket of herring clouds was rolling in from the east.

He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell.

And in the summer the river didn't run at all above ground.

THAT YEAR THE RAINS HAD COME so gently that the Salinas River did not overflow. A slender stream twisted back and forth in its broad bed of gray sand, and the water was not milky with silt but clear and pleasant. The willows that grow in the river bed were well leafed, and the wild blackberry vines were thrusting their spiky new shoots along the ground.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.

And when he drove away from his old friends they knew they would not see him again, although he did not say it. He took to gazing at the mountains and the trees, even at faces, as though to memorize them for eternity.

The smell of azaleas and the sleepy smell of sun working with chlorophyll filled the air.

And I get to tend the rabbits…Lennie giggled with happiness.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

Al bent over her. And he saw the bright evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

For hours he would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground.

Salinas for the alkali which was white as salt.

The sea lions felt it and their barking took on a tone and a cadence that would have gladdened the heart of St. Francis. Little girls

In the summer when the hands of a clock point to seven, it is a nice time to get up, but in winter the same time is of no value whatever. How much better is the sun!

The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can't believe. It isn't only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly. There's a quality of fire in these colors. I got high in the mountains before dusk.

What makes Travels with Charley so readily accessible to even the most casual reader is the deft evocation of the natural world, the colors and textures of leaves on the trees, the rich smells of earth, the slur of rain on pavement, the sharp rays of the sun as they pillar through a scud of clouds. Indeed, one can hardly open a page of this book without stumbling upon some bright image from nature.