The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.

Having exhausted the possibilities based on his limited investigation so far, he got out of the car, walked down a wooden boardwalk, and reached the beach. It was nearly six-thirty, and the café...

The Garden Under Snow Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write onclare who was never minebut always belonged to herselfSleeping Beautya crystalline blanketthis is her springthis...

If you took the world away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made - a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a...

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less...

A lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back.

When you looked up to the sky and cried Why? sometimes the sky shrugged. Yet other times it answered with the warm assurance of linked hands. Sorry, it whispered on the wind. Sorry for all the pain...

Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be...

The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life.

He had imagined Scotland as being a soft place, all gentle heathery hills, but here on the north coast everything seemed sharp and jutting, even the grey clouds that scudded across the pale blue sky....

Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born...

At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

I wonder if the snow the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer...

I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?

He fell to the seat, she by his side. There no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, the the snow melts, that the rose opens,...

We all rather live under wraps, don't we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid...

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks "the...

In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more...

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.{, Oct. 10, 1842}

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an...

The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I...

No free man needs a God; but was I free?How fully I felt nature glued to meAnd how my childish palate loved the tasteHalf-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!My picture book was at an early ageThe...

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in...

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her.

If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is...

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the...