Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled furyโyou cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.
Donald C. PeattieThe Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.
Donald C. PeattieBeauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.
Donald C. PeattieAs the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leavesโthe fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbonโperceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. โฆ Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. โฆ They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.
Donald C. Peattie