Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Teale
Edwin Way Tealewas an American naturalist, photographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930 - 1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 milesof automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth2 June 1899
CountryUnited States of America
I see, when I bend close, how each leaflet of a climbing rose is bordered with frost, the autumn counterpart of the dewdrops of summer dawns. The feathery leaves of yarrow are thick with silver rime and dry thistle heads rise like goblets plated with silver catching the sun.
Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!
Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.
How 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.
How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.
A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.
In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.
Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area.
Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.
The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature's midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night.