Hal Borland Quotes - Page 2

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

When we talk of flood control, we usually think of dams and deeper river channels, to impound the waters or hurry their run-off. Yet neither is the ultimate solution, simply because floods are caused by the flow of water downhill. If the hills are wooded, that flow is checked. If there is a swamp at the foot of the hills, the swamp sponges up most of the excess water, restores some of it to the underground water supply and feeds the remainder slowly into the streams. Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

A root, a stem, a leaf, some means of capturing sunlight and air and making food - in sum, a plant. The green substance of this earth, the chlorophyll, is all summed up in the plants. Without them we perish, all of us who are flesh and blood.

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.

Time after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn; but it comes gradually. Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day. But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness of the small hours, one can hear it, a foretaste of Winter silence. It’s a little painful now, and a little lonely because it is so strange.