"Some plant lips on Mother Earth in a display of gratitude.Meanwhile, she is kissing the soles of your feet, recognizing the one to be worshiped is you."

"The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217."

"I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets."

"That year the Ribeiro's daffodils seeded early and they seeded cockroaches. Now, ecologically speaking, even a cockroach has its place -- but these suckers bit. That didn't sound Earth-authentic to me. Not that I care, mind you, all I ask is useful. I wasn't betting on that either."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

"Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?"

"There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently."

"Wadsworth MoorWhere the millstone of skyGrinds light and shadow so purple-fineAnd has ground it so longGrinding the skin off the earthEarth bleeds her raw true darknessA land naked now as a woundThat the sun swabs and dabsWhere the miles of agony are numbnessAnd harebell and heather a euphoria."

"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man."

"Those who have never seen a leopard under favourable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most gracefuL and the most beautiful of all animales in our Indian jungles."