Best 9 quotes of Nathanael Johnson on MyQuotes

Each animal fit into its own track, where it wouldn't overlap with and be muddied by the sounds of another. In a very real way, the animals were an orchestra: Each instrument made itself heard by producing a different set of frequencies. The elephants were the bass cellos, the hyenas the oboes, the hyraxes the clarinets, the insects the violins, and the bats the piccolos over the top.

If people start paying attention to the organisms that are thriving, unseen, among us, I think it will change us for the better: On the political scale, we'll become more realistic and effective in our efforts to protect the environment; on the personal scale, we'll be happier and more full of wonder.

If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.

It's simply not possible to always see the world fresh and in full, like a child, while also making money, paying bills on time, and taking care of a family...But doing this work and occasionally acting like a two-year-old pays dividends of awe and pleasure. It doesn't take very much time to notice that you live within nature...Wonder doesn't come from outside after driving somewhere spectacular, it comes from within: It's a union of the natural world and the mind prepared to receive it.

I've spent a lot of time considering what lessons I want to pass on to my own kids...Rather than conquering nature or giving it fake human morality, I'd want her to simply approach nature with open eyes and curiosity.

Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.

None of the ginkgo's aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It's not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal or rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take open-hearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.

Sometimes my mind snaps under all this stimulation and I enter a sort of fugue state in which I manically click from one window to another without accomplishing anything. It's hard to break out of this; the feeling is remarkably similar to the sense of being powerless to stop eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.

What's true of other people is also true of places: to know deeply is to love more. To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.