Quotes About Nature

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

Everything happening here was already known. Our people said long ago that this day would come. They told of how the forest was about to die, when humans suddenly remembered the rest of their family." And for half the night, the characters sit around the blaze, laughing and listening and whispering and baying at the moon up in the spruces' spires.

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

Sih Hsuin gasps. "Look the color!" The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green.

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.

Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we're just starting to learn how to see.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear.

He's never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness

Kids in my class think a black walnut looks just like a white ash. Are they blind?" "Plant-blind. Adam's curse. We only see things that look like us. Sad story, ain't it, kiddo?

Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn't have to choose between the Earth's interests and ours. They'd be the same!

The turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming, says Jeremiah. only people fail to recall the order of the Lord.

Two barred owls traded their call-and-response: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Who would ever cook for this boy, aside from me? I couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet. Maybe I didn't want him to. I liked him otherworldly.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress' name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!

During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was ike a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.

There may be ten million different species on the earth, or a hundred million species. The forest canopy is the earth's secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don't have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.

Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature's crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry.