Small Wonder Quotes
"The news of it came to me as a parable that I keep turning over in my mind, a message from some gentler universe than this one."
"The story of the child and the bear came to me on the same day I read the year’s opening words on the bombing campaign in Afghanistan."
"In a world whose wells of kindness seem everywhere to be running dry, a bear nursed a lost child."
"We are all beasts in this kingdom, we have killed and been killed, and some new time has come to us in which we are called out to find another way to divide the world."
"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do."
"We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain."
"To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar."
"Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us."
"I believe we could do the same for the 35,600 of the world’s children who also died on September 11 from conditions of starvation, and extend our hearts to the fathers and mothers who lost them."
"At first light we woke to the booming exchanges of howler monkeys roaring out their ritual 'Here I am!'"
"Yes, he’d been seeing macaws lately, he said, usually in pairs, 'practicando a casarse'—'practicing to be married.'"
"The mix of hope and fatalism in this dicho speaks perfectly of the macaw’s fierce love of freedom and its touching vulnerability."
"On a trip like this, you revise your hopes: If we saw even one free bird, we decided, that would be enough."
"He’ll arrange delivery-truck passage back out to Puerto Jiménez, buy the gold you’ve mined, watch your vehicle for a small fee while you hike, or simply offer a theoretical rest room among the trees out back."
"The steep gray beach offered rugged access to the park."
"Is he friendly?' Barbara asked in Spanish. The girl grinned broadly. 'Muerde'—'He bites.'"
"Macaws are seed predators, given to cracking the hearts of fruit seeds or nuts."
"If these creatures are doomed, they don’t act that way: El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste, but who could buy or possess such avian magnificence against the blue sky?"
"I have tried to teach my children to love nature as my parents taught that reverence to me—through example, proximity, and plenty of field guides and age-appropriate biology books."
"The first people to inhabit North America arrived here without a biblical mandate to go forth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth."
"The religion of their descendants, at least, precludes such smugness."
"We’ll preserve the wilds, sure, but we still want to own them somehow, and take home a snapshot as proof."
"The day I see a Soil Microbe Beanie Baby, I’ll know we’re getting somewhere."
"The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see."
"We want every square inch of our national parks to be accessible by paved road and private automobile, with rest rooms ever handy."
"‘My God.’ The spectacular perfection of that nest, that tiny tongue, that beak calibrated perfectly to the length of the tubular red flowers from which she sucks nectar and takes away pollen to commit the essential act of copulation for the plant that feeds her—every piece of this thing and all of it, my God."
"As the limestone softly crumbles, the forest retrieves it."
"As far as I could see in every direction, a dark green sea of untouched forest rolled out to the whole, encircling horizon."
"Even in a normal year, and few would guess how much effort we devote to waiting and prognosticating."
"Desert ephemerals, they’ve learned, use a surprising variety of strategies to fine-tune their own cycles to a climate whose cycles are not predictable."
"The flowers will go on mystifying us, answering to a clock that ticks so slowly we won’t live long enough to hear it."
"I have never understood how anyone could have the slightest trouble blending religious awe with a full comprehension of the workings of life’s creation."
"I’m a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer’s whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral."
"My daughter is in love. She’s only five years old, but this is real."
"They’re going to be just my chickens, Grandma. Not even one of them will be my sister’s."
"In Lily’s eyes this guy, whom she named Mr. Doodle, was the standard of perfection."
"Growing hens alongside my vegetables, and hornworms and pigweeds as part of the plan, has drawn me more deeply into the organic cycle of my gardening that is its own fascinating reward."
"Watching Mr. Doodle’s emergent maturity has also given me, for the first time in my life, an appreciation for machismo."
"Seems to me you put a chicken in a box, and she looks around and says, 'Gee, life is a box.'"
"I never got to India, but in various stages of my free-wheeling youth I tried out living in a tent, in a commune, and in Europe, before eventually determining that I could only ever hope to dent the salacious appetites of my homeland and make us a more perfect union by living inside this amazing beast, poking at its belly from the inside with my one little life and the small, pointed sword of my pen."
"I’m a critic of this shameful contract, and of wasteful consumption, on general principles."
"Globally speaking, I belong to the 20 percent of the world’s population—and chances are you do, too—that uses 67 percent of the planet’s resources and generates 75 percent of its pollution and waste."
"Somewhere near you, I’m sure, is a farmer who desperately needs your support, for one of a thousand reasons that are pulling the wool out of the proud but unraveling traditions of family farming."
"The soles of your feet made contact with the ground, and your arms opened up as you walked surefooted once again into the life you knew as my mother."
"I never noticed until all at once they burst through the trellis in a pink red purple dazzle."
"I am too awkward and quiet behind my curtain of waist-length hair, a girl unnoticed, a straight-A schoolmouse who can’t pass for dumb and cute in a small-town, marry-young market."
"I could not bear to be anyone but his wife just now. I could not bear to be anyone but the mother of my daughters."
"I have always wondered why short stories aren’t popular in modern America."
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."
"The problem of poverty is so complex that it’s impossible to fix."
"I’ve chucked many half-finished books into the donation box."
"I have a bone to pick with any behemoth if its strategy includes purposefully locating close to, and outcompeting, the neighborhood shops by offering discounts on its most popular stock."
"I am stunned and flattered to find myself so prominently displayed, and deeply grateful for support I’ve received from any and all bookselling quarters."
"There but for the grace of my guardian angels go I."
"It’s not only starving artists who should care about what we’re losing when an independent bookstore dies."
"Holding on to our independent booksellers is nothing less than a First Amendment issue."
"I have never yet been able to say out loud that I am a poet."
"We’re reluctant to claim ownership of this mystery."
"My daughter came home from kindergarten and announced, 'Tomorrow we all have to wear red, white, and blue.'"
"Freedom of speech and belief are not just nice luxuries, they’re as necessary as breathing."
"In my lifetime our multitude of wars in Central America and the Middle East have been not so much about the freedom of humans as about the freedom of financial markets."
"We were not made to do this killing thing, I swear."
"Life takes awful, surprising turns; that’s no news."
"The biggest weapons we’ll ever build cannot ever really make us safe."
"Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow."