William Bryant Logan > Quotes

“Patience is the mother of joy. It is through patience that we can endure each others company long enough to fall in love, through patience that we can cooperate in a task, through patience that we can go from abysmally bad to almost all right, through patience that we can restrain ourselves from wasting our lives in anger and disappointment. The patient person waits, listens, expects, hopes, nurtures, cares, remembers, speaks, trusts, and is courteous. The impatient person demands, gets angry, hurries, presumes, is careless, despairs, forgets, complains, distrusts, disrupts.”
― William Bryant Logan

“This is the contrary of the Darwin that we mainly receive from the Darwinists. The survival of the fittest is supposed to represent the conflict of sovereign individuals, among which the strongest wins and so gets to go on to the next round of the conflict. But in Darwin's day--at least when he was writing 'The Voyage of the Beagle'--'fittest' did not mean strongest. It meant the one that fit best into the network of mutual need”
― William Bryant Logan, Air: The Restless Shaper of the World

“We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. 'It must be up there somewhere on the horizon,' we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.”
― William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

“Compare the air to a forest. When forest fires occur regularly, there is less fuel for any one fire, so the burns don't become conflagrations. If you prevent forest fires and build up a huge mass of living and dead wood in the forest, when a burn at last occurs, it is likely to be serious and large. When increased atmospheric carbon warms the air and when more vapor is available, conflagrational storms become more likely.
[...]
Will the pattern of storms be seen in the future as an anomaly? Or with so much more water vapor in the air, is it now normal? 'Everyone talks about global warming,' said Gavin Schmidt, head of the NASA climate models at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 'but changes in rainfall often have a bigger impact. We're forcing the climate into a state we have not seen for millions of years”
― William Bryant Logan, Air: The Restless Shaper of the World

“every civilization reaches a still point. The progressives can’t go forward, and the conservatives can’t go back. One demands continual advance, the other longs for yesterday.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“I began to trust in the power of sprouting, and the more I learned, the more I came to believe that trees are more perceptive, more intelligent, more generous, and more persistent than we are.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“This is what the sprouts teach: immortality is not a matter of holding on, but of letting go.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“Beauty is the vocation of the earth.”
― William Bryant Logan

“We would be better to focus more on acts and less on looks. Hedging puts us into the landscape intimately. It makes us pay attention. When we pay attention, we are repaid in many ways.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“The way we treat the land is the way we treat each other, and the ways of humans to each other are as ecologically important as a water table.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“It is strange to think that indeed this grinding, this plowing in solid rock, is responsible for our existence. A cornbelt soil in the United States is an extraordinary machine, even after half a century of rapine at the hands of industrial agriculture. The soil as a body is continually doing work. An acre of good natural Iowa soil burns carbon at the rate of 1.6 pounds of soft coal per hour. It breathes out twenty-five times as much CO2 in a day as does a man. Every acre puts out a horsepower’s worth of energy every day. Without a soil this productive, we would still be hunting and gathering in small”
― William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

“assertion of Jesus that he was the vine through whom the branches lived.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

“By model and reiteration – by patterns of branching – every woody plant rises into the body of the light.”
― William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees