Quotes About Nature

Inside, the animals greeted her. A parrot that had arrived that week, cage and all, squawked at her. The dogs---four of them now---launched into happy yips. One of the cats that had shown up on the porch rubbed itself against her legs. "Oh God, I'm Dr. Dolittle," Leeda said out loud.

When trees burn, they leave the smell of heartbreak in the air.

The fig tree grows its flowers strangely inside out, concealed within the soft interior of the fruit. Erszébet imagines the fig's hidden fairy weight of seeds, grown in sweetness that is also a darkness. Like treasure in a cave.

The skies make no special dispensation for Magi, boy, they piss on everyone the same.

Ponder the capriciousness of human nature, which allows momentary appetites and fleeting attitudes to set the courses for entire lives and future responsibilities.

Love doesn't always come barreling down on you like a train engine. Sometimes it sneaks up on you like spring overtaking winter. The chill winds begin to warm and suddenly the trees have leaves and the flowers are blooming.

She would see the sun set behind the mountain and listen for the whip-poor-wills after dark. And she would be right where she needed to be. Perhaps she was home.

We came across a rucksack, wedged in among the coral. It was fastened up, but it seemed to have been invaded by some weird fluffy white sea creature that was trying to get out. "What's that ?" said Arnie, poking it. Miranda and I took a second look, and started to giggle. "It's tampons," I said. "Expanding widthways when wet—" "Yecch!

Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.

The sea was a landscape of longing, she thought, a landscape of ceaseless change.

Being a cat is nice, said the nearby Cat. I grant you that. Being a cat means you can go from violence to affection without any discernible transition. I kill, I purr, I eat, I sleep.

I call them my kith and kin: earth is in my body, air moves my breath and stirs my intellect, fire is the spark of energy within me and my passion, and water is in my bodily liquids and my emotions.

We're part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother's garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don't have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they're contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.

When an old person dies," Kent said, "even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They're like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.

Waters? A little sunshine never did anyone any harm.

rocks in your mother's garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is.

She was Julia's wild hair, she was the lake her husband had once been carried out of, and no matter what happened next, she was love.

The days are like deer leaping into the forest...they go so fast.

I know people not from here probably don't understand our feeling for these hills. Our love for land not spectacular. Our mountains are not like Western ones, those jagged awesome ones, your eyes always pulled to their tops. But that is the difference, I decided. In the West, the mountains are mostly horizon. We live in our mountains. It's not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.

But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink

The murmur of the limpid stream.

S]he loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart

The Italian was published in 1797 and is considered the novel where Radcliffe's talents for describing nature and focusing on the sublime reached its peak of sophistication. The importance of the idea of the sublime and the ability of nature to awaken it are crucial to the author's philosophy. The success of Radcliffe's previous works enabled her to receive a payment of eight hundred pounds for her original manuscript, a very sizable sum for a novel at that time.

Can this be in human nature! — Can such horrible perversion of right be permitted! Can man, who calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably superior to every other created being, argue himself into the commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious brute.