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Nature Writing Quotes

Browse 42 quotes about Nature Writing.

Nature Writing Quotes

“Broke again? Damn you can never be broken. You can fall, you can get bruises, but you can never be broken. You’re living, breathing, and the best example for yourself. You’re made of galaxies, atoms, fire, and so much more. Never underestimate the magic in you. The light inside you can never be handled by the moths. It’s never your mistake, it’s the eyes that are blind to see the love in your eyes, it’s the hearts that don’t understand how your heart beats for them, it’s the ears that can’t hear the screams you try to raise to make them listen and it’s the soul that’s never able to comprehend the message you sent to them.”

HeartacheBroken HeartSoul MatesThoughts Of The MindWheel Of TimeWhen Things Go WrongMoving Forward In LifeInspired LivingUnderstanding Oneself And OthersNature Writing
Book:Breaking a Pledge
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“The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her. For a woman who saw success as being demonstrated through education, ambition, adventure and conspicuous professional achievement, we must have seemed a poor sample. I don't think anyone ever mentioned "university" in this school; no one wanted to go anyway - people that went away ceased to belong; they changed and could never really come back, we knew that in our bones. Schooling was a "way out", but we didn't want it, and we'd made our choice. Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of "going somewhere" and "doing something with your life". The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn't count for much.”

NatureClassLaborClassismNature WritingEducationation
Book:The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
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“The whole landscape here is a complex web of relationships between farms, flocks and families. My old man can hardly spell common words, but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of landscape. I think it makes a mockery of conventional ideas about who is and isn't 'intelligent'. Some of the smartest people I have ever known are semi-literate.”

NatureClassIntelligenceClassismNature WritingEducationational
Book:The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
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“As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.”

NatureSkyMetaphorDawnImageryConstellationsNight SkyNational ParksGrand CanyonPoetic ProseNature WritingCanyonSunrsie
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper’s seven stars speed in different directions.”

AstronomyCosmosCosmologyConstellationsNaturalistPoetic ProseNature WritingCanyonDeep TimeGrand Canyonn
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.”

EarthNatureBeautySolitudeWildernessArizonaEnvironmental ProtectionGrand CanyonNature WritingCanyonColorado RiverLove Of EarthEarthiestPreservation Of The Wild
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“The wind was blustering again, whipping the curtains. Peter went over to close the window. The moon was now high on the eastern rise, radiant above the church where small water-cart clouds raced across the sky. About to fasten the window latch, his eye was drawn down to the garden. The fox stood under the apple tree looking up at him. The animal began to bark. Each monosyllabic yip and yap seemed to mimic human speech. By some strange power or spell, Peter could understand what the animal was saying. He heard the words loud and clear. ‘I-am Si-on,’ the fox barked. Man and beast looked unwaveringly at one another, neither moving a muscle. The wind stopped blowing, the curtains hung at rest. Peter leaned out the window. ‘What do you want from me?’ he called down. ‘Save-us-from-the-stea-lers,’ barked Sion. Peter’s mind reeled. It would be madness to believe he could understand what the fox was saying—lunacy to think he could commune with it! ‘I must still be asleep,’ he reasoned, closing the window. He sat down on the bed, folding his hands in his lap. But this is not a dream. Lying down, he pulled the bedcovers over himself. ‘Save-us! Save-us! Save-us!’ the fox kept barking from the garden.”

FantasyMagical RealismFolkloreNature WritingChristian FantasyCeltic MythologyAnthropomorphicDruidryCeltic MagicZoomorphism
Book:Heart of the Earth: A Fantastic Mythical Adventure of Courage and Hope, Bound by a Shared Destiny
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“When we reached The Point, we would first feel the slimy, rough rock below our bellies, as if being lifted on the back of a whale. We would pull ourselves along the rock’s massive underwater surface, careful to not graze our hands or knees, then climb up above the water, standing tall beside the tower of rocks. We spent the rest of our time sliding down its slippery backside, over and over again—our own natural playground.”

NatureNature QuotesChildren S BooksHyggeChildren S LiteratureNature WritingChildren S FictionCottagecoreChildren S Book Quotes
Book:Poppy and Pa
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“Late afternoons were for resting in the hammock that hung between the Three Sisters, my favourite trio of birch trees, a book resting on my chest. Other days, I would follow my imagination around our property, my bare feet sinking into pillows of soft moss and rough lichens as I climbed up rock faces or followed a path of fallen pine needles. I would name each plant and tree around me as I filled my pockets with acorns, my soles hardened by the end of the summer.”

NatureNature QuotesChildren S BooksHyggeChildren S LiteratureKidlitNature WritingChildren S FictionCottagecore
Book:Poppy and Pa
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“The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.”

HistoryCapitalismRiversWildernessAgricultureEcologyFree MarketMarketplaceRiverPrivate PropertyCollectivismMarketsMarketEnvironmental HistoryNature WritingDomination Of NatureEcological History
Book:The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
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“Our experience of nature is becoming more and more about what we see on our screens, and less about actually being outside and experiencing it for ourselves. Crouched on the fellside, nose to flower with Purple Saxifrage, I had felt such wonder at just being present with another organism, the kind you can only experience when you’re there, on the mountainside, or in the meadow, or under the trees. It’s impossible to get that same, raw feeling from a television documentary, from our social media feeds or even from a book like this one. True appreciation of nature requires us to form real life bonds with it. [...] I think plants can offer us a lot in this regard, and the fact they can’t move actually allows us to spend time with them in a way that you just can’t with many animals.”

NatureNature QuotesPlantsNatures BeautyNature WritingPlant QuotesConnection To Nature
Book:Where the Wildflowers Grow: My Botanical Journey through Britain and Ireland
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“I pace the shallow sea, walking the time between, reflecting on the type of fossil I’d like to be. I guess I’d like my bones to be replaced by some vivid chert, a red ulna or radius, or maybe preserved as the track of some lug-soled creature locked in the sandstone- how did it walk, what did it eat, and did it love sunshine?”

NatureFossilsGeologyInterconnectednessGrand CanyonNature WritingCanyonDeep Time
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.”

MindfulnessNational ParksPsycheGrand CanyonNature WritingCanyonColorado RiverNature Naturalist
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.”

SpiritualityNatureChristianityBuddhismMysticismNature WritingAll Saints Day
Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
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“When the sunlight hit the trees, all the beauty and wonder come together. Soul unfolds its petals. Flowering and fruiting of plants starts. The birds song light up the spinal column and harmonize the hippocampal functioning.”

NatureBeautyHarmonySunlightNature QuotesPetalsNature S BeautyBeauty In NatureNature WritingHippocampusNeural DevelopmentNeural PlasticityBirds ChorusBirds Song
Book:Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity
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“This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.”

NatureBeautyMindfulnessMemoryLandscapeCanyonsNational ParksGrand CanyonSouthwestNature Writing
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“By sharing it with others, you help ensure that the tallgrass prairie continues to delight future generations. By growing in your knowledge of prairie, you develop a better understanding of the natural world. And by experiencing prairie---over the four seasons, and at various times of day, in all weathers---you develop a heightened sense of awe and wonder that will spill over into every other area of your life. Your adventure is only beginning.”

HikingPrairieNature WritingNature QuoteTallgrass PrairiePrairie StewardshipIntroduction To PrairieNature Adventures
Book:The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction
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“By bringing together our differences we will see how similar we really are. Combining our strengths and talents is how we will survive, and embracing love according to the needs and values of the tribe is how we shall conquer our fear...”

Magical RealismFolkloreGaelicNature WritingChristian FantasyCeltic MythologyDruidryAncient ReligionFolklore SymbolismHistoric Fantasy
Book:Heart of the Earth: A Fantastic Mythical Adventure of Courage and Hope, Bound by a Shared Destiny
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