Quotes About Nature

The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow.

It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant's, the planet's, brain.

great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.

plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people.

What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Trees used to talk to people all the time. Sane people used to hear them." The only question is whether they'll talk again, before the end.

The tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.

Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.

chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.

Dennis Ward, drops by with little gifts, when he's on site. Wasps' nests. Insect galls. Pretty stones polished by the creeks. Their standing arrangement reminds

The trees thicken like enchanted things. Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. Bend over to look at a sapling, and it'll put your eye out.

High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.

All around her, the forest reels from the hottest, driest year since the beginning of record-keeping. Yet another freak, once-in-a-century event, almost annual these days. Fires are popping up all over the park. Code Red every third day.

The many uncatalogued volatile compounds breathed out by needles at night slow her heart rate, soften her breathing, and, if she's right, even alter her mood and thoughts. So many substances in woodland pharmacies that no one has yet identified. Powerful molecules in bark, pith, and leaves whose effects have yet to be discovered.

A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

Trees know when we're close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we're near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods

You're self-reliant. Like your trees." "But that's just it, Dennis. They aren't self-reliant. Everything out here is cutting deals with everything else." "That's what I think, too." She laughs at the purity of his hunch.

leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.

There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.

The tree bulks out. Its bark spirals upward like Trajan's Column. Its scalloped leaves carry on turning sunlight into tissue. It more than abides; it flourishes, a globe of green health and vigor. And