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All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.

Hal Borland

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Hal Borland
Age: 77 †
Born: 1900
Born: May 14
Died: 1978
Died: February 22
Author
Writer
Shape
Yesterday
Shapes
Tomorrow
Summarized
Yesterdays
Tomorrows

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland
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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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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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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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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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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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Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
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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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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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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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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[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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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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He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.
Hal Borland
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There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks.
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