Quotes About Nature

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.

The mountains are so beautiful they make me ache inside because the moment I look away I know I shall need to see them again. And I cannot spend the rest of my life standing on the spot staring at shifting sunlight and mist and shadows across the sea.

Golf seems to me an arduous way to go for a walk. I prefer to take the dogs out.

Ik zag geen bietebauw, maar wel waren de geesten van de pokkedoden van Antwerpen in de vorm van een zwerm spreeuwen in de kastanjeboom neergestreken. Met hun honderden zwarte lijfjes zetten ze de boom voortijdig in blad. Ze vlogen in slierten op en streken opnieuw neer alsof ze vastzaten aan een laken dat door een reuzenvrouw werd opgeschud.

Don't wear perfume in the garden — unless you want to be pollinated by bees.

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea; roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

bathed in the thick honey gold of the sun through encircling trees only just beginning to turn the muted metal colors of fall.

Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.

voice)...it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth.

Fireflies winked, and the darkening bay breathed and sighed like a great dolphin and the thin pure curve of a young moon hung in the green sky...

and the afternoon flowed on into lavender evening.

At the dune line, just before the whispering stands of sea oats and dune grass began, the sand was as damp and cold as the skin of a snake under my feet.

Watching the tiny shrimp and snails on the sea whips, I realized that those moments between birth and death are exactly what we have in life. If we just pay full attention to each of them as we live it, the universe will tell us what it's about. And I strongly suspected that it was as much about sea whips and snails as it was about humans.

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

I am surprised to see that the ocean is still going on.

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.