A Year in the Maine Woods Quotes

“To walk in the woods and not recognize the songs [of the birds] is to not hear them. To not think of the birds' uniquely beautiful and artfully concealed nests is to have the woods seem empty. Most of us are like sleepwalkers here, because we notice so little.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“The ravens play individually, in pairs, or in samll groups; they circle high, dive, fold their wings, and shoot up or down with one or several of their fellows. They chase and frolic, tarry, turn loops; they make croaks, high cries, and rattling sounds. They do anything but fly in formation. They remind you of a bunch of schoolboys wandering down a lonely road, kicking a ball along. The geese fly mechanically, calling unvaryingly and beating their wings at a steady disciplined rhythm like soldiers marching off.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“There is beauty not only in that things work, but how they work.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“Life here in this part of Maine is almost inconceivable without wood, and woods. We burn it for heat. Some cut it for a living. Many earn their livelihood from it by making paper, if not toboggans, snowshoes, apple boxes, or canoes. But it all comes from trees. Trees are our lifeblood, in more ways that one. And that is the problem. There are woods, and there is wood, and the two have different uses.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“Around a bend, a pair of wood ducks makes squeaking calls and rises with splashing and then whistling wings. You do not see the male's brilliant garb of red, purple, green, and blue. But you know you are hearing the jewels of the marsh.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“I have no words with which to conjure up in your mind the lilting, lisping song of a black-throated blue warbler, nor with which to give you even a taste of the vibrant, energetic refrain of a winter wren.These sounds come from another world that must be experienced to be felt. There is a limitation of vicarious experience, which reminds me of why I came to these woods in the first place.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“When you consider life as a whole, intelligence is a mere bristle on the hog.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“The newspaper, delivered daily to my mailbox, is a convenience I need to help start my fire in the morning. Not wanting to waste anything, I sometimes even read it.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“I sharpen my own senses and enhance my feeling of well-being by imbibing a brown brew that is liberally served at the Farmington Diner, made from pouring hot water through the ground-up seeds of a tropical shrub. I enhance the flavor by adding a dollop of the udder secretions of a cow, plus the crystallate of the juices of the cane plant.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“It's not minding their opinion that's my objective.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“Every time I build a fire to heat up a cup of coffee, it represents precious time that I have had to invest.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“This abundance of secretions attracts even more blackflies, and they descent as soon as I shur off the saw and pick up the ax for limbing. But I don't begrudge them; they are part of the bargain. It is these tiny critters that help keep Maine green, by keeping people out.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“The job has not been done to Admiral Hyman Rickover's specifications. He admonished, "Nature is not as forgiving as Christ.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“Give a man the secure possession of bleak rocks," Arthur Young said in Travels in 1787, "and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years of lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert ...”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods