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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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Hal Borland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1900
Born: May 14
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Writer
England
Plunge
Anyone
October
Lives
Purple
Autumn
Area
Perennial
Temptation
Maple
Areas
Adjectives
Sea
Oaks

More quotes by Hal Borland

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October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
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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Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.
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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Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.
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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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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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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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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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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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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All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.
Hal Borland
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There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.
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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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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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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Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland
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No winter lasts forever no spring skips its turn.
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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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