Quotes About Nature

Whether one has a correct outlook on the revolution or not is revealed particularly at a time of severe trials. People reveal their true nature in adverse circumstances.

Life is complex, and entropy is real.

They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

And the old ones were burly people, as strong as bears or wolverines. One of Thorn's stories told how an old one had married a bear by mistake, and neither of them had noticed; their daughter told them about it years later, not at all pleased with them.

Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it

knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.

A pinch of mother is worth a pack of shaman.

He felt himself dissolving down into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. The mountain mumbled in his ear, I am. With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass . . .until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate.

Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.

All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.

twenty million years.

Very little of the high Sierra makes it into its images. If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras, you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that!

The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France.

viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

A mammal never forgets a hurt;

The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture.

Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth.

after over a century of such noise, the windy silence of the outdoors was strange, a kind of aural hollowness.

What's good is what's good for the land.

But it isn't right! I mean I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it— I destroy what it is, what I love in it.

We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive!

See Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala for a vivid demonstration of why this is true.)

She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.