Hal Borland Quotes

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

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

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.

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

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

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.

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

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

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

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

The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.

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

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

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

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

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

March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.

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

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

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

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

Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.

October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

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.

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.

He who walks may see and understand. You can study all America from one hilltop, if your eyes are open and your mind is willing to reach. But first you must walk to that hill.

No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it.

There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

If the voice of the brook was not the first song of celebration, it must have been at least an obbligato for that event.

The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.

The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.

Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

A frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

No winter lasts forever no spring skips its turn.

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

No Winter lasts forever no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep and we know it.

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