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“I've always felt there is something sacred in a piece of paper that travels the earth from hand to hand, head to head, heart to heart.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“A day like this ... is almost too perfect to be legal.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“Along with rising and falling water, winter is the province of wind. When the sea-breath and mountain-roar bend the hemlocks of these hills, the birds hang on as best they can.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“Himalayans (blackberries) seize the land, gobbling acres, blanketing banks, consuming abandoned farmhouses and their Studebakers and anything left alone in the rain for five minutes or longer.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.”
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“still other winters average their rain months into a long, cold season of relentless sog and little color. At such times, looking out through the spattered glass, I feel, deep in some spongy, unignorable organ, that we will have floods, and damage, and losses; we will have gray till the cows come home, and there will be no more cows--they'll all just rot, drown, or simply wash away. We will have rain until the very hills dissolve. And when the dirty cotton swaddling of fog finally falls away, we will all be desperate for vital signs.”
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“the crushed carcasses of slugs and frogs mixing with the Cretaceous carbons of tar give the road an organic glaze.”
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“That kind of walk is nice when it happens, but I'll take four minutes now and then over being butt-stapled to a chair all day long.”
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“The river has indeed become an inefficient conduit, but the same plaque that plugs this artery used to hold back the flow when it was soil in the hills. Now the land just bleeds when it rains.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“This sort of day makes indoor work seem shameful. So working outside, whether in the garden or the woods or on the front porch..., is a sacrament.”
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
― Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place
“I thought of a sign I had seen... another scary time, when I was two hundred feet up in a giant karri tree in South West Australia. At the point where the precarious spiral ladder grew even steeper and narrower to reach the fire-watch platform atop the tree, the sign said: 'Reassess Your Situation Now: Turn Back if You Are Not Comfortable'. Then, as now, that seemed like damn good advice.”
― Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year
― Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year
“I often tell students that we should aspire to be amanuenses to the land: to let the land speak (in all its voices, human and otherwise), then take dictation, and try to get some of the words right.
“How do you know when you get the words right?” they ask.
“You know,” I reply. When we do, the leaves not only speak; they positively sing.”
― Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays
“How do you know when you get the words right?” they ask.
“You know,” I reply. When we do, the leaves not only speak; they positively sing.”
― Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays
“Worship a cabbage white butterfly, or a cabbage root maggot, or a cabbage. For God is all of these equally, or nothing at all: take your pick. A messiah would be better off appearing as a flower- able to turn water into nectar- look there for a miracle! Worship what you will if you must...but the world needs love more than worship. In love lies the only real shelter there is...”
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