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
A man who never sees a bluebird only half lives.
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.
The 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.
To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.
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.
In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation.
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.
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.