""Kel: He says he's changed.
Neal: I suppose he could have changed, I myself have noticed my growing resemblance to a daffodil.
Kel: You do look yellow around the edges. I hadn't wanted to bring it up.
Neal: We daffodils like to have things brought up. It reminds us of spring.""
— Tamora Pierce (Page)

"Every part of my body felt electric. My chest ached and my head throbbed with the great terrible limitless possibility of the morning, and when it came, the sky was washed white, everything was new, and I hadn't slept at all."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"When someone doesn't show up, the people who wait sometimes tell stories about what might have happened and come to half believe the desertion, the abduction, the accident. Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown. Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?

Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh,why are people so crazy?"
— Anne Frank

"I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin..."
— Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."
— Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)

"The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?

Such a house could even be the whole world."
— Lydia Millet (How the Dead Dream)

"What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being."
— George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone)

"And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery."
— Stephen King (Duma Key)

"In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.'"
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book.

The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable."
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all.

Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be."
— Alan Weisman (The World Without Us)

"They waited.
The door did not open.
The rain did not stop.
The darkness made a tent and covered them completely."
— Timothy Findley (Not Wanted On The Voyage)

"Clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion."
— Stephen King (Duma Key)

"What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold."
— Lydia Millet (How the Dead Dream)

"But perhaps he had enough animal strength and detached intelligence that he could make another start."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.

Character building, my father said.

Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.

Still, it was better than jail.

I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Twisted)

"You roll back to me."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets--the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself."
— Diane Ackerman (The Moon by Whale Light and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians and Whales)

"Un lucru pe care putem să-1 recunoaştem este că
frecventarea marilor opere, folosirea minţii proprii, citirea
lucrărilor unor genii, chiar dacă nu te face cu certitudine
inteligent, face riscul mai probabil. Desigur, există oameni
care au citit Freud, Platon, care ştiu să jongleze cu cuarci şi
să deosebească un şoim-călător de un vinde-reu, şi care
să fie nişte imbecili. Cu toate acestea, potenţial, în contact
cu o multitudine de stimuli şi lăsîndu-ţi spiritul să
frecventeze o atmosferă stimulatoare, inteligenţa găseşte
un teren favorabil dezvoltării ei, exact la fel ca o boală.
Căci inteligenţa este o boală.""
— Martin Page

"The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.'"
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"I can think of no sadder example of our food paradigm than two posters taped to the window of a California IHOP. One is a colorful photo of pancakes heaped with bananas, strawberries, nuts, syrups and whipped cream with the caption, 'Welcome to Paradise.' Lower down, an 8x10 photocopy states: 'Chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in food or beverages sold here.' Such signs are posted on many fast-food outlets. Heaven isn't a place on earth, at least not at these drive-throughs."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born."
— Lydia Millet (How the Dead Dream)

"April 19
And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon."
— Elizabeth Smart (NECESSARY SECRETS: JOURNALS OF ELIZABETH SMART)

"Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group."
— William Faulkner

"Once when I looked up, I happened to see a sea eagle poised on magisterial wings above the knurled summit of the mountain behind my tent. It was a scene of peerless tranquility, tossed out in Nature's devil-may-care way, which says: Just open your eyes, my friend, and I'll astonish you every minute of your life."
— Lawrence Millman (Last Places: A Journey in the North)

"Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust."
— Lawrence Millman (Last Places: A Journey in the North)

"They are not sorrows, so much as terrible things."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"Nobody likes to life anchors."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"And chase hard and good and with no mistakes and do not overrun them."
— Ernest Hemingway (Islands in the Stream : A Novel)

"Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters--Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on--and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"The planting of [orchards] represents a reduction of a complex ecology into the monocultural grid of modern agriculture, and the transformation of a complex symbiosis with the land into the simpler piecework or agricultural labour for surplus and export."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.' The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the large territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

"Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term ["biophilia"] in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"Having commodified nature, we're eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope. "
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, we've become so removed from reality that we're starting to prefer artificiality."
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)

"...I came across a Haida saying that had etched itself into my memory banks: 'Joy is a well-made object, equaled only to the joy of making it.'"
— Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession)