Quotations on Nature and Writing
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It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.--William Faulkner

Easy writing's curst hard reading.--Richard Sheridan

Writing forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.--Sherwood Anderson

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.--Marie Curie

Animals don't look like people, but they think like people, and they really are people under their pelts.--Hopi Indian

We have respect for the animals. We don't keep them in cages or torture them. We know that the animal has a spirit. It's not just an animal. It's much more than that.--Koyukon Indian Hunter

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.--Francis Scott Fitzgerald

I change myself, I change the world.--Gloria Anzaldúa

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he choose to be or not.--Nathaniel Hawthorne

For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and unfed since childhood days. I am often lonely. Who is not? But I should be lonelier in the heart of a city.--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in Cross Creek

There's a whisper on the night-wind,
there's a star agleam to guide us
And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go.
--Robert Service

Siddhartha said: "Is it not true, my friend, that the river has very many voices?"
"It is so," nodded Vasudeva, "the voces of all living creatures are in its voice."
--Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates." --Anthony Storr in Solitude

The piles of cheap yellow paper grow, empty cups accumulate, my cat slips on the manuscript as she jumps onto the littered desk. I cock my ears at the burbock bush outside my window to tune my tone. --M.C. Richards in Centering

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks. --William Beebe in Edge of the Jungle

Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when.
--Pablo Neruda

there are expanses...
that only I know
because I am sad and old
and I know the earth and I am sad
--Pablo Neruda in "Melancholy in the Families"

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. --Stanley Kunitz

It's often the coyote within us that gives our poems life. --Susan Goldsmith Woolridge in poemcrazy

The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it. --John Burroughs in Boy and Man

You have to beat out for yourself many mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it. --Mary Austin in The Land of Little Rain

Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them: telling of their wanderings even by their scents alone.--John Muir --in The Mountains of California

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. --Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey

I still find a cactus or an ocotillo very good company. I respect their virtues and they are indifferent to my weaknesses. --Joseph Wood Krutch in The Desert Year

The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human.--Brian Swimme in The Universe is a Green Dragon

The earth will solve its problems, and possibly our own, if we will let the earth function in its own ways. We need only listen to what the earth is telling us.--Thomas Berry in The Dreams of the Earth