191 quotes found
“Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet bl...”
“It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have ne...”
“In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following h...”
“The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patch...”
“Xerxes, I read, halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid pene...”
“And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps a...”
“I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I...”
“You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldnt it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a m...”
“Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesnt hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients ultima Thule, the modern explorers Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most d...”
“I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the worlds coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could...”
“It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudsons Bay....”
“Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, th...”
“Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, an infinite storm of beauty.The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random bl...”
“In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. Theyre out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing pe...”
“An anchorites hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker ...”
“Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we r...”
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor doe...”
“I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for s...”
“The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can se...”
“Yesterday I watched a curious nightfall. The cloud ceiling took on a warm tone, deepened, and departed as if drawn on a leash. I could no longer see the fat snow flying against the sky; I could see...”
