Nathanael Johnson Quotes & Sayings

But Roosevelt was just as much a faker. He constructed his macho persona from the ground up. When he first entered public life at the age of twenty-three as a New York state assemblyman, he was a rich kid with soft hands, a squeaky voice, and clothes that were a little too fashionable for his own good. The newspapers gave him nicknames: "Jane-Dandy," "our own Oscar Wilde," and "Punkin-Lily." He went west to shake this reputation. Viewed from this angle, Roosevelt's entire life looks like one gigantic exercise in overcompensation. — Nathanael Johnson

As pigeons were making their descent from bird of the aristocracy to bird of poverty, the native American passenger pigeon was going extinct. The paved habitat that allowed pigeons to spread was replacing the forest habitat that had supported passenger pigeons. We traded a bird of the trees for a bird of the city. Feral — Nathanael Johnson

Angell and Marzluff once spotted an airborne group of crows playing with a ball of paper above a University of Washington football game. One crow would carry the ball a few wing lengths and then drop it, at which point the others would dive in, the fastest one snatching it from the air. They repeated rounds of this corvid quidditch over and over again, causing attention in the stands to stray from the earthbound athletes. And at the University of Montana, a crow learned to gather up small packs of dogs by whistling and calling what for all the world sounded like "Here, boy!" The bird would lead the dogs on frenzied chases across campus for no apparent reason. To — Nathanael Johnson

To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love. — Nathanael Johnson

When you are able to affix yourself somehow, to bridge the abyss with a relationship with another creature of any sort, it's easier to make the case that there is some way in which the whole of creation matters, that it has, if not a purpose, at least an invigorating vitality. — Nathanael Johnson

The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives. — Nathanael Johnson