Quotes & Sayings About Green Hills

Coloring excited him, not the act of filling in space, but choosing colors that no one else would select. In the green of the hills he saw red. Purple snow, green skin, silver sun. He liked the effect it had on others, that it disturbed his siblings. — Patti Smith

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time. — Edward Abbey

My first years were spent living just as my forefathers had lived - roaming the green, rolling hills of what are now the states of South Dakota and Nebraska. — Standing Bear

And I knew what I wanted: I would settle in a hill station and write my novel. I had visions of myself at a table on a large veranda, my notes spread out in front of me next to a steaming cup of tea. Green hills heavy with mists would lie at my feet and the shrill cries of monkeys would fill my ears. The weather would be just tight, requiring a light sweater mornings and evenings, and something short-sleeved midday. Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming the reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? — Yann Martel

In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnelhouses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare. — Victor Hugo

In Monterey, at the small airport rental agency, he hired a vomit-green Ford Tempo. It was an offense to his refined sense of color. The Tempo's tempo was satisfyingly allegro on flat roads but a bit adagio on the hills. — Dean Koontz

Mountains & low hills would enclose us, & gardens & woods & green spaces would surround us - And each pretty house & its garden would hide itself in its very own corner - And the beloved & understanding people would stroll in & out just when they chose & read to each other under trees on lawns & tell stories on broad porches while the mountains & the clouds & the birds & the flowers would look & listen & delight & always understand what everybody meant because they would all belong.
-from Frances Hodgson Burnett: The unexpected life of the author of the Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Sleeper in the Valley
The river sings and cuts a hole in the meadow,
madly hooking white tatters on the rushes.
light escalades the strong hills. The small
valley bubbles with sunbeams like a beerglass.
The young conscript bareheaded and open-mouthed,
his neck cooling in the blue watercress;
he's sleeping. The grass soothes his heaviness,
the sunlight is raining in his green bed,
baking away the aches of his body. He smiles,
as a sick child might smile himself asleep.
O Nature, rock him warmly, he is cold.
The fields no longer make his hot eyes weep.
He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his breast lies open,
at peace. He has two red holes in his left side. — Robert Lowell

IT WAS THE COUNTRY OF HER BLOOD, AND AS SHE WATCHED it rise and fall and spread outside the truck window, Iona understood it was the country of her heart. It settled into her like a sip of whiskey on a cold night, warm and comforting. Green hills rolled under a sky layered with clouds, stacked like sheets of linen. The sun shimmered through them, making intermittent swirls of blue luminous as opals. Fat — Nora Roberts

Someone once told me his idea for surviving a crash of civilization was to be a lone wolf, heading for the hills, with his rifle and knife, living off the land. "Nowadays, I'm more interested in staying behind and helping others," he said, "like after Hurricane Katrina. Coming together and rebuilding something that can last."

"How about BEFORE a disaster?" I asked.

"Even better. — Michael Carter

When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then — Chief Seattle

There is a mystical quality to the place where sea meets land, the clashing of two very different worlds. Yet continuity remains between them. The oceans reclaim the earth with their wind and water. The earth soaks up the sea to be carried off by the rain. They are always in flux. Each has their specific creatures, breathing in their own given ways, but dying in the same way, caught in a constant battle to survive. They swim and run and fly in tranquil spaces, among rolling hills and waves, great blue and green expanses, mountains both below the surface and above. And there is violence in their worlds. — F.G. Capitanio

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. — Jean Rhys

Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series. — Eric Morecambe

And your green eyes are the color of the hills- the color of my home.' His voice dropped to a whisper. 'Aye, there's something about you, Lindsey Waters. — Cyndi Tefft

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. — Scarlett Thomas

He lifted the book from the purse. The cover sported a painting of a stunning redhead in a long, pink gown who stared out the window over rolling green hills. The cover was slightly narrower than the rest of the book, and from underneath peeked out what looked to be a second cover. He turned the page and was startled at what he saw. Another full-color painting, but this one of a shirtless man smashing the heavily bosomed redhead onto a red couch. Her clothes were torn and their torsos met violently. The man's face was savage; the woman's head thrown back in surrender.
Sam flicked back and forth between the image of the prim, composed woman on the front cover and her ribald, passionate abandon on the inside cover.
He glanced out the window to see Ally emerge onto the street below, her head held high and her gait tight and focused as she marched away, prim and composed.
He flipped to the inside cover.
Hot damn. — Diana Holquist

Racing over the hills in the country the wind blew vast rings of shadow that dwindled again to green. — Anonymous

I'm just as ambitious as ever. Only I've changed the object of my ambitions. I'm going to be a good teacher- and I'm going to study at home here and take a little college course all by myself. Oh, I've dozens of plans Marilla. I've been thinking them out for a week and I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queens my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see ti along for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own that bind, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes - what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows - what new landscapes- what new beauties - what curves and hills and valley's further on. — L.M. Montgomery

The hills roll for miles; green, flourishing, dotted with trees and hikers. The blue sky is endless and the sun illuminates through the thin white clouds. There's a breeze coming upward and also across and as they collide it makes me feel as if I'm flying. — Jessica Sorensen

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. — John Updike

Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills
swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades. — Joe Bageant

Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a 'crime' to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda's chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the torrid afternoon world of our house. — Andre Aciman

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills. — David Byrne

Meanwhile, spring came, and with it the outpourings of Nature. The hills were soon splashed with wild flowers; the grass became an altogether new and richer shade of green; and the air became scented with fresh and surprising smells
of jasmine, honeysuckle, and lavender. — Dalai Lama XIV

He-and he was quite definitely a he, there was no possible doubt about that- had been carved out of the turf thousands of years before. A white outline against the green, he belonged to the days when people had to think about survival and fertility in a dangerous world.

Oh, and he had also been carved, or so it would appear, before anyone had invented trousers. In fact, to say that he had no trousers on just didn't do the job. His lack of trousers filled the world. you simply could not stroll down the little road that passed along the bottom of the hills without noticing that there was an enormous, as it were, lack of something- e.g., trousers- and what was there instead. It was definitely a figure of a man without trousers, and certainly not a woman. — Terry Pratchett

And if she asks you why you can tell her that I told you
That I'm tired of Castles in the Air
I've got a dream I want the world to share in castle walls
Just leave me to despair
Hills of forest green where the mountains touch the sky
A dream come true, I'll live there 'til I die
I'm asking you, to say my last good-bye
The love we knew, ain't worth another try — Don McLean

In Texas there's so much space words have a way
Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken
So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;
And when they say it the silence is not broken,
But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them
Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills,
And they are part of that silence that outlives them. — May Sarton

Though a country be sundered, hills and rivers endure;
And spring comes green again to trees and grasses
Where petals have been shed like tears
And lonely birds have sung their grief.
... After the war-fires of three months,
One message from home is worth a ton of gold.
... I stroke my white hair. It has grown too thin
To hold the hairpins any more. — Du Fu

The murderous look in his eyes made her legs turn to jelly.
'Don't,' he spat out, 'make the mistake of getting me angry.'
'You're not angry now?' she croaked in disbelief.
He let her go abruptly and smiled, cocking a brow as she slid down into a crouch. 'Not at all,' he said smoothly. 'I merely wanted to set some ground rules.'
Henry's mouth fell open. The man was insane.
'First of all, no more devious little plots to try to get rid of me.'
Her throat worked convulsively.
'And no lies!'
She gasped for breath.
'And-' He paused to look down at her. 'Oh, Christ. Don't cry.'
She bawled.
... 'I haven't cried in years.'
He believed her ... Dunford looked around frantically, as if the green hills would somehow tell him how to get her to stop crying. — Julia Quinn

Contentment has learned how to find out what she needs to know. Last year she went on a major housecleaning spree. First she stood on her head until all the extra facts fell out. Then she discarded about half her house. Now she knows where every thing comes from - who dyed the yarn dark green and who wove the rug and who built the loom, who made the willow chair, who planted the apricot trees. She made the turquoise mugs herself with clay she found in the hills beyond her house.
When Contentment is sad, she takes a mud bath or goes to the mountains until her lungs are clear. When she walks through an unfamiliar neighborhood, she always makes friends with the local cats. — J. Ruth Gendler

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest. — Anne Rivers Siddons

All day the blanket snapped and swelled
on the line, roused by a hot spring wind ...
From there it witnessed the first sparrow,
early flies lifting their sticky feet,
and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.
Clouds rose over the mountain ... At dusk
I took the blanket in, and we slept,
restless, under its fragrant weight. — Jane Kenyon

The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific — James A. Michener

Jerusalem (1804)
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills
Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land — William Blake

. . . They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars. . . — Henry Miller

Nancy grabbed Plum's hand and together they ran around the last curve and then they were leaning against the old stone wall that marked Lookout Hill. Far, far down below them, a river was trying to wriggle its way out of a steep canyon. Over to the right, thick green hills crowded close to each other to share one filmy white cloud. To the left, as far as they could see the land flowed into valleys that shaded from a pale watery green, through lime, emerald, jade, leaf, forest to a dark, dark, bluish-green, almost black. The rivers were like inky lines, the ponds like ink blots. — Betty MacDonald

Mine is the time of foliage,
When hills and valleys teem
With buds and vines sweet scented,
All clothed in glowing green.

My nights are bright and starry,
My days are long and clear
And truly I'm the fairest,
Of all months in the year. — Mary Weston Fordham

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved. — Stephen Fry

My Heart's In The Highlands
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Chorus.-My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.
Farewell to the mountains, high-cover'd with snow,
Farewell to the straths and green vallies below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
My heart's in the Highlands, &c. — Robert Burns

THE SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants. — John Steinbeck

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. — Virginia Woolf

in the middle of this God-forsaken desert, the government built an oasis. The designers included rolling hills, a small river, walking trails, two small lakes, and dozens of large one and two story buildings that seemed to be part of the environment. And there was grass, lots of bright green grass right there in the middle of the desert. It was synthetic but it looked real and made the place look like a picture on a travel brochure. — Clint Morey

They knew what gunfire meant better than anyone. Some were crying by the time they reached the exit and stepped outside into the afternoon air. The sun was already descending in the sky, leaving shadows crawling across the valley floor. Not daring to look behind her, Khalia's eyes fixed on her target, the emergency bunker. Across the expanse of lush green grass before her, the beckoning hillside seemed impossibly far away. A warning prickle began at her nape, as if someone had her in their sights and was taking aim at her. More shots erupted from the hills behind them. The lead group broke — Kaylea Cross

All of a sudden I found myself with the reputation of being a swinger and a home-wrecker. Beverly Hills wives were supposed to live in fear in case I cast my green orbs in the direction of their men. Ninety-nine per cent of this was total fabrication. — Joan Collins

MITFORD BOOKS BY JAN KARON At Home in Mitford A Light in the Window These High, Green Hills Out to Canaan A New Song A Common Life In This Mountain Shepherds Abiding Light from Heaven Home to Holly Springs In the Company of Others Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good — Jan Karon

To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills. — Wallace Stegner

Hills of forest green where the mountains touch the sky, a dream come true, I'll live there til I die. — Don McLean

All the unhallowed beauty I have found; All free - discordant shrills and form-defying wonders above ground, like writhen trees with draggled foliage struggling along the courses of wayback creeks; scarlet - and - green sky - streaking parrot - fires with parrot shrieks echo - shattering the shoulders of the hills; and desert - sunset - rage Rage for my mind, be clamant, do not cease you are my holiest habitat of peace. — Rex Ingamells

But when I shut my eyes and am in Pushkar again, in the room that spells out the formula for joy (clean sheets, hot water, books to borrow and the promise of blue hills in the distance), I see the window with its green shutters, casting the room in that happy gloom that only shuttered windows can. — Devapriya Roy

The gorse was in bloom, the fuchsia hedges were already budding; wild green hills, mounds of peat; yes, Ireland is green, very green, but its green is not only the green of meadows, it is the green of moss - certainly here, beyond Roscommon, toward County Mayo - and Moss is the plant of resignation, of forsakenenness. The country is forsaken, it is being slowly but steadily depopulated... — Heinrich Boll

Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have. But you can't eat a leather belt like it's a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days. — Lisa See

Landscape planners will have the opportunity to make sculptured roofscapes, so that cities appear to be verdant hills and valleys. Streets will become shady routes carved through the undergrowth. Roofs will become mountain tops. People will become ants. — Tom Turner

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. — George Eliot

From his companions, and set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk: Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades. Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near - Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green; So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen — John Keats

I did some commercials and a couple of B movies, then a few pilots that didn't go anywhere. Eventually I did the pilot for Beverly Hills, 90210. The rest is history. — Brian Austin Green

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene. — Mary Shelley

SOMETIMES, BUT NOT OFTEN, a rain comes to the Salinas Valley in November. It is so rare that the Journal or the Index or both carry editorials about it. The hills turn to a soft green overnight and the air smells good. Rain at this time is not particularly good in an agricultural sense unless it is going to continue, and this is extremely unusual. More commonly, the dryness comes back and the fuzz of grass withers or a little frost — John Steinbeck

Even among the ugliness of evil that resonated throughout the green hills and flowering landscape, Northbrook was simply breathtaking to those who took the time to appreciate it. — Madison Thorne Grey

I remembered the taste of good Italian coffee in my London flat, brewed at the expense of time and a good deal of mess, compared to the sort that came out of machines in the office at the press of a button. I remembered walking to art school, through the windy winter, over hills and heaths: how much gladder I was to reach the rich warmth and to toast my hands on a radiator, than if I had gone by car. I remembered the nickels my father gave me as a child for being good: how much more I valued them than I would a dollar bill given all at once for no reason. Of course God as the ultimate parent could give happiness for the asking, just as my father could have given a handful of dollar bills, but at the age of five would I have known its value, or would it have looked to me just like a wad of grubby green paper? — Sumangali Morhall

Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor ... great scarlet arcs of silk ... saffron ... green ... crimson ... and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite ... and along the lower rim of beauty lay the hard harsh line of the hills ... — John Coldstream

All at once the hard, cold earth seemed to explode. The brown surface of the world dissolved and in its place was an impossible, an inconceivable, an unbelievable profusion of color: green grass and purple and red flowers; sprays of lily; white baby's breath that covered the hills; nodding fields of bright yellow daffodils; rich purple moss. The trees burst forth with new leaves. The weeping willow tree was a mass of tiny pale green leaves, thousands of them, which whispered and sighed together as the wind moved through its branches. There were fat heads of lettuce in the fields, and cucumbers lying like jewels among them, and enormous red tomatoes surrounded by thick, knotted vines.

And for the first time in 1,728 days, the clouds broke apart and there was dazzling blue sky, and light beyond what anyone could remember.

The sun had come out at last. — Lauren Oliver

If time could run backward, like a film in reverse, we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Green hills wash sunlight blue. — Mike Mullin

God had given him a gift when he opened his eyes to see her smile and the lovely glimmer of fathomless green pools. Her gaze reminded him of the rolling hills of his beloved Scotland. With Eva, he was home. With her in his arms, he could achieve anything - fear nothing. If only... — Amy Jarecki

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known — J.R.R. Tolkien

Young and old will sit and judge unfeeling, while the empty churches' bells are pealing. And the green hills lay ignored, untended, lonely watchers remain unbefriended. — Pete Townshend

The only thing here was a long gray ribbon of road, stretched like tape stuck by a toddler onto a rolling carpet of green hills under a huge arch of blue sky. This is Virginia. My Virginia, anyway. — Beth Harbison

Like the hills under
dusk
you fall away
from the light:
you deepen: the green
light darkens
and you are nearly lost:
only so much light as
stars keep
manifests your face:
I feel the total night
in myself rave
for the light along your lips. — A.R. Ammons

She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting. — Neil Gaiman

I need not shout my faith. Thrice eloquent Are quiet trees and the green listening sod; Hushed are the stars, whose power is never spent; The hills are mute: yet how they speak of God! — Charles Hanson Towne

Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them - the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills. — Fredrik Logevall

The boy stood on the highest knoll of the low country in the Western Kingdom of the Ring, looking north, watching the first of the rising suns. As far as he could see stretched rolling green hills, like camel humps, dipping and rising in a series of valleys and peaks. The burnt-orange rays of the first sun lingered in — Morgan Rice

This culture destroys landbases. That's what it does. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that comes to mind cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground? One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested (we've all heard of the cedars of Lebanon). Greece was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested.
We'll say it again: this culture destroys landbases.
And it won't stop doing so because we ask nicely. — Derrick Jensen

Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water. — Hugh Walpole

The beauty of the island [Bora Bora} wasn't limited to its turquoise waters or green hills. That was mere surface beauty. The real awe of the place was evident in its stories. There was one waiting beyond every curve of the shore. — Sarah Jio

Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops. — Jon McGregor

Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide. — Sharyn McCrumb

Oh land of farms and green hills mild
Once formed by giants rough and wild
With massive paws they gripped and tore
With one great rip they formed the shore
Where heavy boots left prints so deep
Blue lakes remain 'tween summits steep
The giants fought beneath our skies
And from their bones our mountains rise — Shannon Hale

In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-gray beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing color and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth. — Anuradha Roy

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. — Anonymous

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away - just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings - they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so - breaking lines of force, someone's. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there - no. I don't believe that. Words never went on in there. — Anne Carson

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth. — Robert A. Heinlein

But the Lady Amalthea and Prince Lir walked and spoke and sang together as blithely as though King Haggard's castle had become a green wood, wild and shadowy with spring. They climbed the crooked towers like hills, picnicked in stone meadows under a stone sky, and splashed up and down stairways that had softened and quickened into streams. — Peter S. Beagle

You ask me why I dwell
amidst these jade-green hills?
I smile. No words can tell
the stillness in my heart.
Peach blossoms drift streamwater
away deep in mystery.
I live in the other world
one that lies beyond the human. — Li Bai

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo. — G.K. Chesterton

Yet here, this night, you might repose with me, On green leaves pillowed: apples ripe have I, Soft chestnuts, and of curdled milk enow. And, see, the farm-roof chimneys smoke afar, And from the hills the shadows lengthening fall! — Virgil

Nurse's Song
WHEN the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.
No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.
Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed.'
The little ones leaped and shouted and laugh'd
And all the hills echoed. — William Blake

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone. — Italo Calvino