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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For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.
Hal Borland
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The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.
Hal Borland
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A frontier is never a place it is a time and a way of life.
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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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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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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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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The earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.
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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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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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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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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Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?
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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Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.
Hal Borland
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Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
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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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
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All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.
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