The Night Country Quotes

“To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular
story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“There are subjects for which I have more than ordinary affection because they are associated in my mind with kindly and understanding men or
women--sculptors who left even upon such impliant clay as mine the delicate chiseling of refined genius, who gave unwittingly something of their final character to most unpromising material.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, and of allowing for the free play of the creative spirit.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Directly stated, the evolution of the entire universe—stars, elements, life, man—is a process of drawing something out of nothing, out of the utter void of nonbeing.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Yet without the emergence of superior or differently adapted individuals—beneficial mutations, in other words—the doorways to prolonged survival of the species would, under changing conditions, be closed. Similarly, if society sinks into the absolute rut of custom, if it refuses to accept beneficial mutations in the cultural realm or to tolerate, if not promote, the life of genius, then its unwieldy slumbers may be its last. Worse is the fact that all we know of beauty and the delights of free untrammeled thought may sink to a few concealed sparks glimmering warily behind the foreheads of men no longer in a position to transfer these miraculous mutations to the society which gave them birth.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child’s future—and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. Like a responsible doctor, he knows that he will fail in many instances—that circumstances will destroy, or genes prove defective beyond hope. There is a limit, furthermore, to the energy of one particular man or woman in dealing individually with a growing mass of students.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies, as we shall see a little further on, a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual’s prospects of success.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Perhaps there is a moral here which should not go unobserved, and which makes the artist’s problem greater. It also extends to the scientist, particularly as in the case of Darwin or Freud, or, in earlier centuries, such men as Giordano Bruno or Francis Bacon. “Humanity is not, as was once thought,” says John Dewey, “the end for which all things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is the center of interest and the measure of importance.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Strangely, I, who frequently grow round-eyed and alert as an owl at the stroke of midnight, find it pleasant to nap in daylight among friends. I can roll up on a couch and sleep peacefully while my wife and chatting friends who know my peculiarities keep the daytime universe safely under control. Or so it seems. For, deep-seated in my subconscious, is perhaps the idea that the black bedroom door is the gateway to the tomb.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“I used to lie for hours staring into the dark of the sleeping house, feeling the loneliness that only the sleepless know when the queer feeling comes that it is the sleeping who are alive and those awake are disembodied ghosts.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Along drowned coasts of this variety you only see, in a sort of speeded-up way, what is true of the whole world and everything upon it: the Darwinian world of passage, of missing links, of beetles with soldered, flightless wings, of snakes with vestigial feet dragging slowly through the underbrush. Everything is marred and maimed and slightly out of focus—everything in the world. As for man, he is no different from the rest. His back aches, he ruptures easily, his women have difficulties in childbirth—all because he has struggled up upon his hind legs without having achieved a perfect adjustment to his new posture.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Across that midnight landscape he rides with his toppling burden of despair and hope, bearing with him the beast’s face and the dream, but unable to cast off either or to believe in either. For he is man, the changeling, in whom the sense of goodness has not perished, nor an eye for some supernatural guidepost in the night.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“The technology which, in our culture, has released urban and even rural man from the quiet before his hearth log has debauched his taste. Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“One period, for reasons of its own, may be interested in stability, another in change. One may prefer morphology, another function. There are styles in science just as in other institutions. The Christianity of today is not totally the Christianity of five centuries ago; neither is science impervious to change. We have lived to see the technological progress that was hailed in one age as the savior of man become the horror of the next. We have observed that the same able and energetic minds which built lights, steamships, and telephones turn with equal facility to the creation of what is euphemistically termed the “ultimate weapon.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“Here, indeed, we come upon a serious aspect of our discussion. For there is a widespread but totally erroneous impression that science is an unalterable and absolute system. It is supposed that other institutions change, but that science, after the discovery of the scientific method, remains adamant and inflexible in the purity of its basic outlook. This is an iron creed which is at least partly illusory. A very ill-defined thing known as the scientific method persists, but the motivations behind it have altered from century to century.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“To those who have substituted authoritarian science for authoritarian religion, individual thought is worthless unless it is the symbol for a reality which can be seen, tasted, felt, or thought about by everyone else. Such men adhere to a dogma as rigidly as men of fanatical religiosity. They reject the world of the personal, the happy world of open, playful, or aspiring thought.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“He knows that every step he takes can lead him into some unexplored region from which he may never return. Each individual among us, haunted by memory, reveals this sense of fear. We cling to old photographs and letters because they comfort our intangible need for location in time. For this need of our nature science offers cold comfort. To recognize this, however, is not to belittle the role of science in our world. In his enthusiasm for a new magic, modern man has gone far in assigning to science—his own intellectual invention—a role of omnipotence not inherent in the invention itself. Bacon envisioned science as a powerful and enlightened servant—but never the master—of man.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“The long history of man, besides its ennobling features, contains also a disruptive malice which continues into the present. Since the rise of the first neolithic cultures, man has hanged, tortured, burned, and impaled his fellow men. He has done so while devoutly professing religions whose founders enjoined the very opposite upon their followers. It is as though we carried with us from some dark tree in a vanished forest, an insatiable thirst for cruelty. Of all the wounds man’s bodily organization has suffered in his achievement of a thinking brain, this wound is the most grievous of all, this shadow of madness, which has haunted every human advance since the dawn of history and which may well precipitate the final episode in the existence of the race.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“There is no life in the fossil. There is no life in the carbon in my body. As the idea strikes me, and it comes as a profound shock, I run down the list of elements. There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me, the water that soaks my tissues is not I. What am I then? I pinch my body in a kind of sudden desperation. My heart knocks, my fingers close around the pen. There is, it seems, a semblance of life here. But the minute I start breaking this strange body down into its constituents, it is dead. It does not know me. Carbon does not speak, calcium does not remember, iron does not weep. Even if I hastily reconstitute their combinations in my mind, rebuild my arteries, and let oxygen in the grip of hemoglobin go hurrying through a thousand conduits, I have a kind of machine, but where in all this array of pipes and hurried flotsam is the dweller?”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“By the eyes, some will say, but I think not, really, for to the spectral tarsier in the bush, or to the owl in the churchyard tower, man and his lights must truly hold a demonic menace.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“But someone found the spirit of the place, a huge old turtle, asleep in the ferns. He was the last lord of the green water before the town poured over it. I saw his end. They pounded him to death with stones on the other side of the pool while I looked on in stupified horror. I had never seen death before.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“This volume, as all my readers will recognize, has been drawn from many times and places in the wilderness of a single life. Though I sit in a warm room beneath a lamp as I arrange these pieces, my thoughts are all of night, of outer cold and inner darkness. These chapters, then, are the annals of a long and uncompleted running. I leave them here lest the end come on me unawares as it does upon all fugitives.”
― Leonard Everett Fisher, The Night Country

“I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country

“Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Night Country