Quote

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Hal Borland

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Hal Borland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1900
Born: May 14
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Writer
Environment
Accuse
Challenges
Violet
Nature
Suspicious
Earth
Ideology
Environmental
Challenge
Squirrel
Bird
Subversion
Tree
Squirrels

More quotes by Hal Borland

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Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
Hal Borland
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No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.
Hal Borland
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Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship with the waters of this world.
Hal Borland
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March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
Hal Borland
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For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.
Hal Borland
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All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.
Hal Borland
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Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.
Hal Borland
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Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.
Hal Borland
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Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.
Hal Borland
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[The Christmas story] is as simple as was the Man himself and His teaching. SA simple as the Sermon on the Mount which still remains as the ultimate basis ... of the belief of free men of good will everywhere.
Hal Borland
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In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.
Hal Borland
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If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.
Hal Borland
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Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.
Hal Borland
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The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.
Hal Borland
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Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.
Hal Borland
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To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.
Hal Borland
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A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.
Hal Borland
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Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland
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For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.
Hal Borland
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Catch a vista of maples in that long light and you see Autumn glowing through the leaves.... The promise of gold and crimson is there among the branches, though as yet it is achieved on only a stray branch, an impatient limb or an occasional small tree which has not yet learned to time its changes.
Hal Borland