#natur

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological. ↗

— Charles Bernheimer

#decadent #emile-zola #feminine #joris-kerl-huysmans #nature

Sublime natures are seldom clean! ↗

— Longinus

#decreation #philosophy #nature

We've tried to live in balance with nature long enough. This time nature went too far. As soon as you and your fiance are safely out of here, I'm calling in an air strike to napalm this whole forest. ↗

— Mykle Hansen

#nature

The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#realism #nature

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#diving #intensity #nature #ocean #scuba-diving

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them consideralbe money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign. ↗

— Mark Twain

#money

Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky. ↗

— John Muir

#john-muir #nature #wilderness #change

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#burning #damage #life #nature #change

Mother nature changes her looks for the same reason any woman changes her looks—to be noticed.  ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#looks #mother-nature #richelle #richelle-goodrich #women

We speak of love when we destroy nature. It sounds like innocence of cruel arrogance. ↗

— Toba Beta

#destruction-of-nature #innocence #speak-of-love #love