top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it...I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Nature quotes
"Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket."
"All outdoors may be bedlam, provided there is no disturbance within."
"Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet."
"When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloudAnd goes down burning into the gulf below,No voice in nature is heard to cry aloudAt what has happened. Birds, at least must knowIt is the change to darkness in the sky.Murmuring something quiet in her breast,One bird begins to close a faded eye;Or overtaken too far from his nest,Hurrying low above the grove, some waifSwoops just in time to his remembered tree.At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!Now let the night be dark for all of me.Let the night be too dark for me to seeInto the future. Let what will be, be."
"These woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep."
"Put your ears to the ground, to the sky, to the sun and the moon... tune in to Mother Earth's sweet song. She has messages to say, knowledge to relay, inspiration to convey... there is much for you to learn. Your journey has just begun."
Explore more quotes by Yann Martel
"How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?"
"You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better."
"When I corrected her, I told her that in fact she was not so wrong; that Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christians, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians, in their devotion to God, are hat-wearing Muslims."
"Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. They prove to be the ones most faithful to them—it is a fact commonly known in the trade."
"A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet."
"Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities."
"These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy...walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening."
"I thought I knew not only her habits but also her limits. This display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her."
"Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud..."
bottom of page