Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain - a magic wand in Nature's hand - every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?
In 1908, there was a persuasive demonstration of the power of high-speed, low-mass asteroids in rural Siberia. The Tunguska impactor iced millions of pine trees and about a zillion mosquitoes - and was no larger than an office building.
It's funny you can pretty much substitute the same actors in that top tier, whether it's a Chris Evans or a Chris Pratt or a Chris Pine, for different movies and it becomes almost a joke. But it doesn't happen that way for people of color.
In a pine tree behind me, an eagle waits out the rain, hunched into himself, brooding. Crows squabble, a murder chasing a raven. Seals cruise the lines of fishing nets bobbing in the water, hoping for an easy meal, the tender bellies of salmon.
When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together. They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
I grew up in Mountain Pine, Arkansas. You get no more country than where I grew up. But I also grew up in the Napster / iTunes / Spotify/ iHeart Radio era, and so I see that everything is influenced by everything else, and that's what country music is now.
Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.
For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
I used to love martial arts movies starring Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme. In one of Van Damme's movies, he would break a pine tree. I would kick banana trees because I used to live on a farm. My father would get mad at me because I would break all of the banana trees around.
I've never owned an actual trail-running shoe myself, but maybe I should. My favorite paths are fraught with peril, much of it skulking at shoelace level. A rock, a root, an errant pine cone. Wham, and you're down, choking in dust and picking pebbles from wounds in your forearms and knees.
Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing.
All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other mountains. The weather is mostly sunshine embellished with magnificent storms, and nearly everything shines from base to summit - the rocks, streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, and the forests of silver fir and silver pine.
When I go to Indian reservations in the West, and especially to the Pine Ridge Reservation, I sometimes feel unsure where to put my foot when I open the car door. The very ground is different from where I usually stand. There are fewer curbs, fewer sidewalks, and almost no street signs, mailboxes, or leashed dogs.
The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.
My 'Rot & Ruin' series is a post-apocalyptic adventure for teens. My 'Joe Ledger' novels are science-based action thrillers for adults. My 'Dead of Night' stories are zombie tales for adults; my 'Pine Deep Trilogy' is classic horror for adults, and I've written nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to folklore.
For years, I was watching other people have so much fun playing out their version of authorship, like Louis C.K. and Larry David. As I watched them do their thing, I began to pine for the days when I had a lot less expected of me and, often, a lot more creative freedom. The courage that those guys have is always captivating to me.
I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.
I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.
My dad was somewhat of a naturalist and used to teach us about different birds and trees. So did a fifth grade teacher who made a lasting impact on me; to this day, I remember his lessons about counting the needles on pine trees, seeing if they are twisted or straight, and about checking the tips of oak leaves to see if they are pointed or lobed.
