Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons, and revocable only by shotgun. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
James Joyce on the Universe
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” –James Joyce, The Dead
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.
Writing about the home run ball in Ted Williams’s last at-bat at Fenway Park, John Updike wrote:
It was in the books while it was still in the sky.
(from Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One)