Hal Borland Quotes

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.

A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

Of all the everyday plants of the earth, grass is the least pretentious and the most important to mankind. It clothes the earth is an unmistakable way. Directly or indirectly it provides the bulk of man's food, his meat, his bread, every scrap of his cereal diet. Without grass we would all starve, we and all our animals. And what a dismal place this world would be!

Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.

Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.

Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves.... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.

The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.

March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.

The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.

To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.