“Mother-love, in beasts and birds, can’t always be observed carefully, because of innate animal secrecy, but—to revisit an old Ohio highway for a moment—I once encountered a mother quail leading her young across the road in a single file. She diverted my attention from them by pretending to have a broken wing, and flopped around almost at my feet, in an exhibition of bravura acting something like that of the late Lionel Barrymore as Rasputin. When the small birds had disappeared into the deep grass, she flew calmly away and joined them.”

James Thurber

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“Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets and other observers jot down in their note-books.”

Wallace Stevens

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“We need to feed our planet, of course. But we also need the teeny creatures that drive all life on earth. There’s something strange about a farm that intentionally creates a biological desert to produce food for one species: us. It’s efficient, yes. But it’s so efficient that the ants are missing, the bees are missing, and even the birds stay away. Something’s not right here. Our cornfields are too quiet.”

Robert Krulwich

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“The ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure. It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.”

May Sarton

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“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way.”

William Blake

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“It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.”

Margaret Atwood

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“Light is not easily perceived unless it falls on something. And much of the time the largest, most complex object visible outdoors will be a tree, or a mass of them—a wood, a forest. Therefore it is often when we look at trees that we actually see the beauty of a certain light.”

Martin Gayford

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“In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.”

Bertrand Russell

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“Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird, do you think? I’m looking at one. (He’s looking at me.)”

Eudora Welty

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“A tree that lives a thousand years might know something about survival.”

David Milarch

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“Found three huge mushrooms when I went out before breakfast to fill the bird feeder. So far only jays come, but the word will get around.”

May Sarton

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“…if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.”

Ray Bradbury

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“The most surprising and fascinating thing I learned is that there are ‘introverts’ and ‘extroverts’ throughout the animal kingdom—all the way down to the level of fruit flies!”

Susan Cain

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“The skeletons of the plants are for me as important as the flowers.”

Piet Oudolf

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“I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”

Maurice Sendak

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