Hal Borland Quotes

“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.”

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

“All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.”

“Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.”

“April is a promise that May is bound to keep.”

“Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.”

“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.”

“July is a blind date with summer.”

“Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.”

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”

“Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.”

“Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.”

“There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.”

“There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.”

“Time after time today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.”

“Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.”

“When legends die the dreams end. When the dreams end there is no more greatness.”

“Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”

“You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.”

“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”

“If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.”

“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.”

“Of all the seasons, autumn offers the most to man and requires the least of him.”

“Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.”