Laura

“I own a house, small but comfortable. In it is a bed, a desk,
a kitchen, a closet, a telephone. And so forth you know
how it is: things collect.

Outside the summer clouds are drifting by, all of them
with vague and beautiful faces. And there are the pines
that bush out spicy and ambitious, although they do not
even know their names. And there is the mockingbird;
over and over he rises from his thorn-tree and dances—he
actually dances, in the air. And there are days I wish I
owned nothing, like the grass.”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within. (Aug 1953 letter to the editor of The Washington Post)”
― Rachel Carson, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson

“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

“Accountability is where the cowardice of my teetering self-image is wrangled into submission by the force of my ethics.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough