Quotes about Nature

It's roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string.

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.

My mother reinforced this affinity for the natural world. In the grandeur of its design—the skeleton of a leaf, the labors of an ant colony, the glow of a bleach-white moon—she experienced the wonder and humility that others reserved for religious worship, and in our youth, she'd lectured Maya and me about the damage humans could inflict when they were careless in building cities or drilling oil or throwing away garbage.

It was hard to tell how lasting these trends would be. I told myself it was the nature of democracies—including America's—to swing between periods of progressive change and conservative retrenchment.

This was it, I thought to myself. My inheritance. I rearranged the letters in a neat stack and set them under the registry book. Then I went out into the backyard. Standing before the two graves, I felt everything around me—the cornfields, the mango tree, the sky—closing in, until I was left with only a series of mental images, Granny's stories come to life.

And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone.

According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, "Grow, grow.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday...

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.