Quotes About Nature

Passionate impulses are not for mollusks, especially us snails. I had rashes on my squamae, and my mesenchyma was in pieces. With the end of the reproductive season, the hormonal levels had dropped, and the romantic agitations had dropped with them. Youth had vanished, and my mucus was drying up.

Even in a golden cage, the nightingale yearns for its native land," says an old proverb.

What's unnatural is homophobia. Homo sapiens is the only species in all of nature that responds with hate to homosexuality.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Men are reasoning rather than reasonable animals.

I have a great sense of Stuart and silence on these nights. The village, wrapped in sleep; owls glide between the yew trees, badgers poddle across the graves. Then Stuart, cleaving the peacefulness. All people, gone. No educational experts, medical specialists, bullies, policemen. His mother's disapproval, hot on his heels, runs out of breath after half a mile. It is Stuart and the earth, just those two.

He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him-mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to eat, pumpkins, chicken, the white sky across the endless, endless bush, and the giraffe that cried, giving its tears for women to daub on their baskets; O Botswana, my country, my place.

a drive in the country, an expedition to a shoe shop a quiet cup of tea under a cloudless sky; each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be.

Look at those clouds, said Jamie, gazing up at the sky. Look at them. Yes, said Isabel. They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them. Look at the shape of the clouds, she said. What do you see in those beautiful clouds, Jamie? I see you, he said.

These sociopaths,' he said. 'What do they feel like? Inside?' Isabel smiled. 'Unmoved,' she said. 'They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It's their natural state.

Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.

What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the the sky, a rainbow.

Sometimes it was important simply to get out. It did not matter where you went, as long as you got out of the office, or the kitchen, or any other place where duty required you to be, and went to some place that you did not have to be.

I shall go and sit under a tree…. Which tree, Mma?... Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one.

I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.

Let's go back to the lines at the end of "In Praise of Limestone": "What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape." Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness.

Do you know that dogs are descendants of wolves—all dogs, even those ridiculous little dogs you see in the parks. Wolves. Imagine how embarrassed a real wolf would be if he knew that he was cousin to a shih-tzu? Of course, we shouldn't think animals have feelings like us—I don't think they can be embarrassed, do you? My daughter's cat is incapable of feeling anything very much, I can tell you—and certainly not embarrassment...

Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

You can't do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart.

A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…There must be reasons why the leaves decay. (From Auden's If I Could Tell You

and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews' place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be.

Music and art and philosophy are ultimately based on the premise that this man on his tractor, and these pigs, and the swarms of bees that fertilise the crops, will all continue to do what they do.