Hal Borland Quotes - Page 3

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.

There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.

Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts.

[The Christmas story] is as simple as was the Man himself and His teaching. SA simple as the Sermon on the Mount which still remains as the ultimate basis ... of the belief of free men of good will everywhere.

The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.

Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.

Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.

In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.

He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

Some people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keepon digging. Most people don't. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can't stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.