• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

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• "That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best."
• "My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares ardently that it come, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the cold black pre-dawn and kneel shivering by the hearth making a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid on the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith, I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains."
• "I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood; nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have."
• "Draba asks, and gets, but scant allowance of warmth and comfort; it subsists on the leavings of unwanted time and space."
• "Perhaps they saw the shadow of things to come, and made a special effort to show the world that pines still know where they are going, even though men do not."
• "-- on some gloomy evening when the snow has buried all irrelevant detail, and the hush of elemental sadness lies heavy upon every living thing. Nevertheless, my pines, each with his burden of snow, are standing ramrod-straight, rank upon rank, and in the dusk beyond I sense the presence of hundreds more. At such times I feel a curious transfusion of courage."
• "A dawn wind stirs the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon."
• "A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place."
• "They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all."