Alan Williams > Alan's Quotes

“a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.”
― Robert Macfarlane

“On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.”
― C.J. Box, Savage Run

“I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we’d been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger, and a swatch of my own hair. A headstone, a footstone. I planted an aspen tree above the headstone, to give her shade, and to someday provide leaf-music in the breeze. It took a long time before I was worth a damn again. How to measure the eleven years of magic she brought to us? How, now, to say thank you? Too late, as usual, for these sorts of things.”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had

“My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.   The”
― Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana

“Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!”
― Lee Child

“An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.”
― Lee Child

“You see, but you do not observe.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia

“Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.”
― Stewart Brand

“He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese.”
― Harlan Coben, Deal Breaker

“I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching. Birdwatching is a state of being, not an activity. It doesn’t depend on place, on equipment, on specific purpose, like, say, fishing. It is not a matter of organic trainspotting; it is about life and it is about living.”
― Simon Barnes, How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher

“hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats).”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had

“I look down and see that Colter has returned and has gone on lock-solid, drop-dead point about twenty feet in front of us, head and shoulders hunched and crouched, bony ass stuck way up in the air, body half-twisted, frozen, as if cautioning us of some hidden, deadly betrayal: and green eyes afire, stub tail motionless. We ease forward, adrenaline-drunk. Nothing happens. And then it does. The cock-bird climbs towering above and then flares and accelerates away; Tim fires twice, I fire twice, Colter runs shrieking after the untouched bird, and from across that spartan landscape we hear the cattlewomen snort small laughs of disbelief, and one of them says, “Oops, they missed again.”   We”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had

“The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it’s always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are bulging with bright red kinnickkinnick berries, and the bright green leaves from the same bush. Tom and Nancy save the crop from each bird they kill and set it on the windowsill to dry translucent in the sunlight—a globe, a ball, filled with Christmas colors, perfect red and green; and then in December they hang these as ornaments on their tree. For”
― Rick Bass, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had

“I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.”
― Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana

“There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards—the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.”
― Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana

“I do believe that clean air, clean water, and wild mountains and old forests are our birthrights; that a wild and healthy landscape is, or should be, a constitutional right, a freedom, to be protected and celebrated. And as with any right, there is an attendant responsibility.”
― Rick Bass

“(I've tried listening to one of those birding tapes but have had difficulty pretending I'm in the woods—no matter how accurately the calls are recorded, I have trouble making myself believe it's a real bird making that call when there is no other accompanying stimuli of the natural world: no odor of marsh or spruce, no slant of sunlight or dimming of dusk; no breeze, no grass rustle, no sky, no earth, and I have to confess also to becoming frustrated with the pace of the narrative on those tapes.”
― Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana

“What is man? Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world. Thinking”
― Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

“The rich-soil part, the mystery beneath all those reasons, is that I love it. There is an awareness, an addictive alertness, a super-heightened sensitivity that approaches and then becomes a kind of spirituality.”
― Rick Bass, The Heart beneath the Heart

“Yet the grinding logic of austerity—passing on the bankers’ bills to the people in the form of public sector layoffs, school closures, and the like—had not yet been normalized.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

“Global reinsurance companies are making billions in profits, in part by selling new kinds of protection schemes to developing countries that have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, but whose infrastructure is intensely vulnerable to its impacts.8”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing demand for men with guns.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing “climate-ready” crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Superstorm Sandy, meanwhile, has been a windfall for New Jersey real estate developers who have received millions for new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues to be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina played out in New Orleans.10”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit went up by 87 percent in the U.S. and by 95 percent in Canada.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“Still, we’ve gone soft since those days of wartime sacrifice, haven’t we? Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim—or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights, our arts and after-school programs. We send our kids to learn in ever more crowded classrooms, led by ever more harried teachers. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this much collective benefit in the name of stabilizing an economic system that makes daily life so much more expensive and precarious, then surely humans should be capable of making some important lifestyle changes in the interest of stabilizing the physical systems upon which all of life depends. Especially because many of the changes that need to be made to dramatically cut emissions would also materially improve the quality of life for the majority of people on the planet—from”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

“In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”28”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate