Environment Quotes to Love
You can find all twenty of these great environment quotes in context in Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience. You can also enjoy them on their own, right here. 🙂
1.
“…it is those individual moments that belong to people, that deserve to be faced and remembered as much as every big, world-changing disaster. And nature, because it exists in the details, is so easy to elide, even when trying to talk about it.”
—Sara Barkat, from the Introduction
2.
“…on this topic, that of the environment, there has been so much already dealt with on anger, on bitterness. Sometimes, in fact, that seems all it’s possible to find—both outside and in. But simple longing is so easily subsumed under more powerfully expressed emotions, and other things just as important as anger become overshadowed.”
—Sara Barkat, from the Introduction
3.
“To say that people weren’t aware, from the first, of the effect the Industrial Revolution was having on nature—and on themselves—is to commit a falsehood.”
—Sara Barkat, from the Introduction
4.
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left…”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), “Inversnaid”
5.
“Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired…”
—Sara Teasdale, “Places”
6.
“From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy.”
—Wendell Berry, “Before Dark”
7.
“The owl
rehearses a song to life.”
—Briceida Cuevas Cob, “The Owl”
8.
We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
—Tony Hoagland, “Jet”
9.
“Grandma potted a cedar sapling
I could take on the road for luck.
She used the bark for heart lesions
doctors couldn’t explain.
To her they were maps, traces of home…”
—Jennifer Elise Foerster, “Leaving Tulsa”
10.
“how far will I walk against the night?”
—Crisosto Apache, “Carrizo”
11.
“How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?”
—Li-Young Lee, “Degrees of Blue”
12.
“I should have been chiseling a garden.”
—Major Jackson, “My Awe Is a Weakness”
13.
“Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember…”
—W. S. Merwin, “Living with the News”
14.
“No one thinks of the flowers.
No one thinks of the fish.
No one wants to believe the garden is dying,
that its heart has swollen in the heat
of this sun, that its mind drains slowly
of its lush memories.”
—Forugh Farrokhzad, “I Pity the Garden”
15.
“What can I do if the star picked me
for its lightning, and if the thorn
pointed out to me the pain of all those others.
What can I do if every gesture
of my hand drew me closer to the rose?”
—Pablo Neruda, “The Egoist”
16.
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water…”
—Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
17.
“Give back to the earth what is hers,
she will forgive you for taking it
or she will turn into a wolf.”
—Scott Edward Anderson, “Shapeshifting”
18.
“Tattered, the cedar tree is chipped to dry heaps of recklessness.
The unwanted spreads by the power of neglect.
The wear of traffic says that we are out of time,
must hurry.”
—Elizabeth Woody, “Home and the Homeless”
19.
The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.”
—Rabindranath Tagore, “The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs”
20.
“The Poetry of earth is never dead…”
—John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”
Want more great environment quotes to love? Explore the poetry of Earth Song…
