All Quotes By Tag: Nature

“Tree At My WindowTree at my window, window tree,My sash is lowered when night comes on;But let there never be curtain drawnBetween you and me.Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,And thing next most diffuse to cloud,Not all your light tongues talking aloudCould be profound.But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,And if you have seen me when I slept,You have seen me when I was taken and sweptAnd all but lost.That day she put our heads together,Fate had her imagination about her,Your head so much concerned with outer,Mine with inner, weather.”

“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.”

“Our ValleyWe don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and Augustwhen the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchardwhen suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almostbelieve something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,something massive, irrational, and so powerful eventhe mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,a silence that grows in autumn when snow fallsslowly between the pines and the wind diesto less than a whisper and you can barely catchyour breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.You have to remember this isn’t your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived besideand thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.”

“Zero HoldingI grow to like the baretrees and the snow, the bones and furof winter. Even the greynessof the nunneries, they are so grey,walled all around with grey stones—and the snow piled up on ledgesof wall and sill, those greyplanes for holding snow: this is howit will be, months now, all so still,sunk in itself, only the cold alive,vibrant, like a wire—and all thebusy chimneys—their ghost-breath,a rumour of lives warmed within,rising, rising, and blowing away.”

“Phoebe asked me, “Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?”I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. “I have no faith at all,” I said, “but sometimes I have hope.”I rather think,” she replied, “that total annihilation is the most comfortable position.”I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.When I die,” she said, “I don’t expect to see any of my loved ones again. I’ll just become a part of all this.” She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. “That’s all right with me.”

“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau’s idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art’s failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.”

“This concern, feebly called ‘love of nature’, seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.”

“BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician”

“Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.”

“It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.”

“How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light”

“Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine coneYou never know What opportunity Is going to travel to you, Or through you.Once a friend gave me A small pine cone- One of a few He found in the scatOf a grizzly In Utah maybe, Or Wyoming. I took it homeAnd did what I supposed He was sure I would do- I ate it, ThinkingHow it had traveled Through that rough And holy body. It was crisp and sweet.It was almost a prayer Without words. My gratitude, Tom Dancer, For this gift of the world I adore so much And want to belong to. And thank you too, great bear”

“The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon.”

“On the beach, at dawn:Four small stones clearlyHugging each other.How many kinds of loveMight there be in the world,And how many formations might they makeAnd who am I everTo imagine I could knowSuch a marvelous business?When the sun brokeIt poured willingly its lightOver the stonesThat did not move, not at all,Just as, to its always generous term,It shed its light on me,My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.”

“In your handsThe dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive.Who would argue otherwise?But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that.What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines?Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping.What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks?And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take yearsBefore, finally, you hear them?”