Quotes About Nature

That's obviously, isn't it?' she said. 'A hawk is always a hawk, except'- and here she raised on heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile - 'except when the hawk is a cabbage.' 'What?' Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed. 'Exactly,' Gertrude said.

What if two equal lions battle for territory, or for a mate?" "They'll each size up the other, testing the odds. A lion is more cautious on equal footing, but even then he won't back down. He has no fear, you see, not as we understand it. He can only be exactly what he is, what his nature dictates, and nothing else.

know that what you've done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust an unnatural thing.

We held on to each other and looked out at the sea. It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts—and we wanted it all.

I went out into the open country running fast, just to feel myself do it.

Away in the distance I could see the cloud-softened crags of Mount Kenya and thought of how wonderful it would be to run there, a hundred miles away.

When the March rains fell over the plains and the ragged face of the escarpment, six million yellow flowers cracked open all at once. Red-and-white butterflies, the ones that looked like peppermint sticks, flashed in twists against the sparkling air. But

I remembered running for miles looking for an occupied warthog hole with arap Maina, and then stooping to crinkle paper outside the mouth of its den. This was what you did to call out the pig, the noise working to aggravate the animal in some way I didn't understand but rarely saw fail.

Almost as soon as I arrived back at Njoro, it began to rain for the first time in over a year. The sky went black, splitting open with a deluge that didn't want to stop.

Before I was even halfway up the steep ridge, I heard the ngoma. Drums set the air vibrating and rang through the ground under my feet as if something were tunnelling powerfully in every direction at once.

That's the problem with going into the world, isn't it? You actually have to face things you find you don't want to know. In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there. If you lay close with them, and matched your breathing with theirs, you sometimes thought you had a great and very rare secret.

Firs and pines and Sitka spruce thicken around me, pushing in from all directions, black-tipped fairy-tale trees that knit shadows out of nothing, night out of day—as if they've stolen all the light and hidden it somewhere.

Outside, the storm picked up, dropping a soundless sheet of white.

I grew up with the Kips. For them, sex doesn't get all tangled up with guilt or expectations. It's something you do with your body, like hunting." "There are people who'd tell you we're exactly like the animals. Same appetites, same urges. It's a nice idea.

I think I could turn and live with animals,' " he read aloud, "they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins….

The animals were like a storm moving whole, and then breaking,

Nature demands our respect, Anna. It has a brutal side for sure, but if you can learn its language, there's peace to be found, and comfort too. The best kind of medicine I know.

You need to learn to live with yourself, not others," he went on. "That's the difficult part. When you learn to accept your own nature, it will start to feel peaceful, not frantic. Maybe then you'll stop throwing yourself at such terrible choices.

baobab. Away in the distance I could see the cloud-softened

The waves reach up and the fathomless sky pushes down.

rounded blue-grey hills that went smoky and purple at dusk before dissolving into the night sky. When we

about the biting white ants that moved in menacing ribbons over the plains, or the vipers or the sun, which sometimes pulsed so brightly it seemed to want to flatten you or eat you alive.

small gully where the red mud had dried and cracked in a system of parched veins.

In the distance, a dust devil churned like a dervish, whirling into a patch of flame trees and unhousing a fat band of vultures.