Hal Borland Quotes (25 Quotes)


    April is a promise that May is bound to keep.

    Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

    A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

    The winter wind is like a cold surf beating through the bare treetops and sweeping through the valleys. It roars in the night, an elemental voice it whistles at the house and TD corner and it rattles the shutter and the pane.

    Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.


    Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason.

    There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things.

    If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

    If there were wild strawberries in Eden, and there must have been, Adam was a fool as well as a sinner to taste any other fruit.

    To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home

    You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

    Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.

    Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.

    He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

    There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

    The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

    To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

    All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.

    Years end is neither an end nor a beginning, but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

    About time, and changing his clock on October 28, 1962, he wrote 'Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all. All we can do with the astronomical absolutes of time is note them, divide them as we please, and liv.

    A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

    For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand.

    No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

    You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

    October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.


    More Hal Borland Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Nature - Patience - Man - Wisdom & Knowledge - Summer - Beauty - Lies & Deceit - Time - Reasoning - Night - Faces - Dancing - Sense & Perception - Arrogance - Home - Fire - Weekends - Discovery & Invention - Promise - View All Hal Borland Quotations

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