nature
The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.
Travels with Charley (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 23
Our metaphors matter. Indeed, our metaphors about trees by and large determine the fate of trees.
Second Nature (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 171.
Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself—no substrate cloud or even mist visible—but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop.
Anima Poetae: from the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 97.
Central Park is to nature as Reddi Wip is to a cow.
“Apartment,” The New Yorker, March 17, 1986: 43–89.
Always the purpose of treatment is only to restore nature’s balance against disease. There is no recovery unless it comes from the force and fiber of one’s own tissues. The physician’s role is to be the cornerman—stitch up the lacerations, apply the soothing balm, encourage the use of the fighter’s specific abilities, say all the right things—to encourage the flagging strength of the real combatant, the pummeled body. As doctors, we do our best when we remove the obstacles to healing and encourage organs and cells to use their own nature-given power to overcome.
The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 278.
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs.
“The Littlest Birds,” The Be Good Tanyas, Blue Horse (Nettwerk Records, September, 2001).
The locust trees shiver a bit, even in the sunlight; and the poplars are talking together in such loud whispers I can hear them way over here. They are discussing September (if you must know).
Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 66.
On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 5.
The gardens [in Japan] are works of art in design, planting and miniaturization. The Japanese favor green gardens, not flowers which die, but evergreens, carpets of moss. Always, the accompaniment of water from a stream directed to fall drop by drop from a bamboo pipe. Each time it stops to allow the water to accumulate, it makes a sound like one dry slap on a drum.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 15.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness then daffodils.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 17.
Digging, raking, hoeing. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendour. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was—is—the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? Gardening defies time; you labour today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye.
“‘So this is old age,'” The Guardian, October 4, 2013.
One by one the stars fell into the sea, the sky drained of its last lights.
Notebook IX, in Albert Camus: Notebooks 1951–1959, trans. by Ryan Bloom (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 244.