It is easier to accept the message of the stars than the message of the salt desert. The stars speak of man's insignificance in the long eternity of time; the desert speaks of his insignificance right now.
Edwin Way TealeHow vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.
Edwin Way TealeLooking at life through the eyes of a Daddy long legs: Imagine walking on legs so long you could cover a mile in fifty strides! Imagine looking to either side through eyes set not in your head but in a... hump in your back! Imagine your knees, when you walked, working a dozen feet or more above your head.
Edwin Way TealeThe seasons, like greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of about fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide. Most of us, like the man who lives on the bank of a river and watches the stream flow by, see only one phase of the movement of spring. Each year the season advances toward us out of the south, sweeps around us, goes flooding away to the north.
Edwin Way TealeIf I were to choose the sights, the sounds, the fragrances I most would want to see and hear and smell--among all the delights of the open world--on a final day on earth, I think I would choose these: the clear, ethereal song of a white-throated sparrow singing at dawn; the smell of pine trees in the heat of the noon; the lonely calling of Canada geese; the sight of a dragon-fly glinting in the sunshine; the voice of a hermit thrush far in a darkening woods at evening; and--most spiritual and moving of sights--the white cathedral of a cumulus cloud floating serenely in the blue of the sky.
Edwin Way Teale