By Category: Nature

“I was a bird, I was flying over stripped earth
Desperate to land desperate to perch - that's how I'd feel
Seldom we find the peace we deserve
Desperate to love, needing rebirth - that's how I'd feel.”

-Caroline, Angie Aparo

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“Diseases are natural phenomena, and everything natural is imperfect and can somehow be fought and overcome. But AIDS is a perfect illness because it is so alien to human nature and has as its function to destroy life in the most cruel and systematic way. Never before has such a formidable calamity affected mankind. Such diabolic perfection makes one ponder the possibility that human beings may have had a hand in its creation.”

-Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas

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“The murder exists like a stone inside of her that she won't be free of, until she hoists it out by the killing. She isn't afraid as much as she is disturbingly calm. She knows it won't be hard for her. When she became a mother, she felt what an animal must feel, the deep pain calcifying into an animalistic protectiveness. It was after giving birth, holding her children, that she felt the most tender and the most capable of murder.”

-The Madam, Julianna Baggott

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“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”

-The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

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“You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name. All they know are songs and poetry, and anything else they hear. They mean well, but they can't seem to keep things straight. And why should they? They die so soon.”

-The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

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“To my mind, the only possibly pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.”

-Neither Here Nor There, Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson

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“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”

-The Awakening, Kate Chopin

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“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”

-Sir Winston Churchill

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“One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.”

-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland

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“It struck me -- every Day --
The Lightning was as new
As if the Cloud that instant slit
And let the Fire through --

It burned Me -- in the Night --
It Blistered to My Dream --
It sickened fresh upon my sight --
With every Morn that came --

I though that Storm -- was brief --
The Maddest -- quickest by --
But Nature lost the Date of This --
And left it in the Sky -- ”

-It struck me -- every Day --, Emily Dickinson

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“He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”

-Stardust, Neil Gaiman

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“I read that many trees, not only by the side of the road but deep in forests, evidence a new fragility. It is in the air. And the rain, or what is in it. Everything alive begins to seem frail, everything. ”

-Susan Griffin

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“I remembered one morning when I discovered a cocoon in a bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it I tried to help it with my breath. In vain.

It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of its wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear, all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

The little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience, for I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”

-Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis

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“As Jake neared this clump of alien grass, the rose began to open before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each burning with its own secret fury.”

-The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands, Stephen King

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“I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

-Self-Pity, D. H. Lawrence

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“Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue;
[...]
yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

The elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten the terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors that they are?”

-Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

-Edvard Munch

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“... I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. The roof jutted too far out, perhaps, or the angle of vision was faulty, or, again, I did not chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell. There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin trick... As I looked up at the eaves of an adjacent garage with its full display of transparent stalactites backed by their blue silhouettes, I was rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be described as the dot of an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to glide down very fast — a jot faster than the thaw-drop it raced. This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket”

-The Vane Sisters, Vladimir Nabokov

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“If I wanted to shake this tree with my hands I should not be able to do it. But the wind, which we do not see, tortures and bends it in whatever direction it pleases. It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. ”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

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“It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires.”

-Marquis de Sade

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“And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.”

-The Fury of Rain Storms, Anne Sexton

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“And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass—”

-The Waning Moon, Percy Bysshe Shelley

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“By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.”

-Rabindrath Tagore

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“'Do you believe that men have always slaughtered each other as they do today, that they've always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates and thieves, weak, fickle, cowardly, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloodthirsty, slanderous, lecherous, fanatical, hypocritical and foolish?'

'Do you believe that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Well, then, if hawks have always had the same character, what makes you think men have changed theirs?'”

-Candide, Voltaire

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