Quotations on Nature and Writing
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The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words. --Logan Pearsall Smith ..........(And the great art of naturewriting is the art of making nature and people real through words.)

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. --Henry Miller

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader--not the fact that it's raining, but the feel of being rained upon. --E.L. Doctorow

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life. --Dame Edith Sitwell

At best, the genre we call nature writing requires a rare mixture of scientist, philosopher, and poet. --Edwin Way Teale in Green Treasury

Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area. --Edwin Way Teale in Green Treasury

Only through art can we get outside ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. --Marcel Proust

Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
--William Wordsworth

A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view. –Henry David Thoreau

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. --Henry David Thoreau

We need the tonic of wildness...We can never have enough of nature...We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.--Henry David Thoreau in Walden

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it and understands its nature best? ... No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes truest use of the pine. --Henry David Thoreau in The Maine Woods

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is a society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.
--Lord Byron

Be a good animal, true to your instincts.--D.H. Lawrence

These hours of beauty have meant so much to me, somewhat in the writing, but much more in the long incalculable hours and days out of which the writing has risen like the blue smoke out of woods, that I want to share them with others." --Fiona Macleod

Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and "the dead months" will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest. --Fiona Macleod in Where the Forsest Murmurs

To write meant then and still does, catching sparks of thought in a hard-backed notebook balanced on my knees.--Doug Robinson in A Night on the Ground A Day in the Open

My uncles were farmers, men who took their only truth from the earth.--Rudolfo A. Anaya in Bless Me, Ultima

For Ultima, even the plants had a spirit, and before I dug she made me speak to the plant and tell it why we pulled it from its home in the earth.--Rudolfo A. Anaya in Bless Me, Ultima

Who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying.-- Ralph
Waldo Emerson

The simplest words, we do not know what they mean unless we love and aspire.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not plan long journeys because whatever you believe in you have already seen. When a thing is everywhere, then the only way to find it is not to travel but to love. --St Augustine in City of God

Eternity is the now that does not pass away. -- St Augustine

To appreciate it [winter], you must wait for it a long time, hope and dream about it, and go through considerable enduring.--Sigurd F. Olson in The Singing Wilderness

My task...by the power of the written word is to make you hear, to make you feel, to make you see.--Joseph Conrad