World Wild Life Quotes & Sayings

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. — Thomas Moore

Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. — Oscar Wilde

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been
Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she
had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances.
For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter
what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way.
And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself.
Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again.
And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right. — Cynthia Voigt

O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles ... a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope. — Fernando De Rojas

I've never been a believer in fate. I like to think I'm in control, that my life hasn't been plotted out ahead of time. Sometimes all it takes is one wild thought, one brave decision to change everything. This must be one of those times. — Kyle Richardson

Strange friend,' I said,'here is no cause to mourn.' 'None,'said the other,'save the undone years, The hopelessness.Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world. — Wilfred Owen

And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature. — Jay Griffiths

Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures. — Simon Van Booy

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty ...
Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax. — Everett Ruess

Part of my life no longer made sense. A life of meetings stretched between appointments, half listening to people, always running late. A life dictated by clocks and money and computers and cars, without hawks and lakes and wild roses. A world increasingly without surprise or humor. I thought of how we as a species have endangered not only animals and plants around us but the wild nature of our own lives. We have fabricated this world, to paraphrase the writer Phillip Sherrard, and our punishment is that we have to adapt to it. — Norah Gallagher

Here is my life, this life I never knew I could have, here is the whole world waiting for me, all the possible things. My future is as big as the wild night, the wine-dark sea. — Sarah McCarry

Because a child is bound to grow, society is intent upon cultivating the child's mind to mature into a very specific type of responsible person. Children take great pleasure in small things that have no practical purpose in their dreamy world where they can be as wild as wind. Each year a part of the child dies, as it is burden with adult responsibilities. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.
And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry. — Wendell Berry

We cannot learn freedom and responsibility within the confines of our own species. We cannot understand life and death and what they are for in exclusively human terms. Without that which is wild, the world becomes a cell block. — Stephanie Mills

A man with integrity, with vision, with a sense of purpose and place in the world as exactly himself. That's the kind of man I'll settle for. — Nikki Rowe

[Chris] gave his life in exchange for knowledge and his story is his contribution to the world. I feel complete now to put this story behind me as it was on my mind for quite some time. — Krakauer Jon

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind. — John Updike

I have a perfect life where I read; I go out into the wilderness and camp. I meet scientists and learn about their studies of wild animals, and then I come home ... and start creating the world I have seen. — Jean Craighead George

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass! — Wendy McClure

He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world's greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived. — Richard Curtis

Many years later after the sell-outs, betrayals, and hatred which would tear us apart, when our brotherhood had been destroyed, I'd always look back and remember that night. That fucking wild night at the KeyClub, when the smoke stung my eyes but my world was full of nothing but blind hope. When life was not a mockery, but a very real fire which flamed through my veins like the most incredible drug... the night when Kelly-Lee Obann, drunk, high and barely 20 the time, looked out through his hair with a terrible nakedness and said to me;
"We're not gonna make it out of this alive. You know that, right? — H. Alazhar

There were glaciers on the mountains, in my dream. Giant white and blue masses of ice, eons forming, creeping ever so slowly toward the valleys they would never reach. The valleys were filled with flowers, wild and abandoned, twisting, reaching like tallest trees far above my head. Fairies twirled and skimmed. Fairies. Beings that proclaimed that life was fair in this perfect world ... . — William David Hannah

Frankly, I am quite tired of those who tout Christianity as a way to stop smoking or drinking or break wild habits of the world. Is that all Christianity is, to keep us from some bad habit? Of course, regeneration will clean us up, and the new birth will make a man right. If that is what Christianity is all about, what about the person whose life is not that bad? The purpose of God in redemption is to restore us again to the divine imperative of worship. We were created to worship, but sin destroyed that ability. Jesus Christ, on the cross, redeemed us and brought us back to the place where we now can worship and have fellowship with God Almighty. My clean life is a by-product of my conversion. My life may have pointed out to me that I needed a drastic change, but that is not the purpose for which I was converted. The essence of conversion is to bring me into a right relationship with God and have fellowship with Him. — A.W. Tozer

Live more than your neighbor. Unleash yourself upon the world and go places. Go now. Giggle, no, laugh. And bark at the moon like the wild dog that you are. Understand that this in not a dress rehearsal. This is it. Your life. Face your fears and live your dreams. Take it all in. Yes, every chance you get. Come close. And by all means, whatever you do, get it on film. — Jon Blais

One of the remarkable characteristics of young wild sunflowers, in addition to growing in soil that is not hospitable, is how the young flower bud follows the sun across the sky. In doing so, it receives life-sustaining energy before bursting forth in its glorious yellow color.
Like the young sunflower, when we follow the Savior of the world, the Son of God, we flourish and become glorious despite the many terrible circumstances that surround us. He truly is our light and life. — Quentin L. Cook

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself
he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. — Kevin Brockmeier

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live. — Annie Dillard

Hello," Life says, "Remember me?
We started out together here
When you were just a bundle
Of innocent amazement.
Remember how you saw the world
With nothing but wonder?
We were such rowdy playmates then.
We painted on the sky with clouds
And made magic out of
Clothespins and peanut butter.
Remember, can you, how I became stained and heavy
With trouble?
Not safe now. Lots of no.
They dressed me in painful clothes
And made you wear them, too.
You don't recognize me, do you
But I've never abandoned you
Or lost my wild, happy desire
To show you
Play with you
Kiss you
Hide and seek down twisty paths
And always discover more.
Want to run away with me again?
Shall we elope without ever leaving
Because that's possible, you know.
I've never been anywhere but here
Waiting for you
To remember. — Jacob Nordby

Kenny is a drug, and I've just had the best hit of my life. I'm not losing this addiction. I'm in, all the way, pledging my voluntarily servitude to the gateway of my desire. Kenny was the freedom I was longing for. Love and all this wild pent up desire, proved to be the combination that set me free. But only Kenny had the power to unleash me. She scrubbed the impurity from my life and washed clean the world, so I could see it stark and clear for the very first time. Kenny perfumed my existence with her regal charm, her sovereign splendor. Kenny is in everyway sublime. — Addison Moore

I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and ragging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another. — Jennifer Egan

I like life, it's wonderous and chaotic and somewhere in the middle I've created a safe place to do my thing in the world ~ I can't ask for much more & I am already so thankful when everything I got — Nikki Rowe

On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I've seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she's like an adolescent: rigid with ancient, middle class attitudes, unable to think for herself, falling back on old verities ... victim of her family teaching, shocked by what shocks people, wanting what people usually want. She wants a home, a husband, and her idea of a husband is a man who earns a certain amount of money, helps around the garden, does the dishes ... the idea of a good husband that's found in This Week magazine; a viewpoint from the most ordinary stratum, that great ubiquitous world of family life, transmitted from generation to generation. Despite her wild language. — Philip K. Dick

The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums. — Sydney J. Harris

I see a man who wants the world to think he has everything but is actually very lonely. You have a wild side, but you don't want that life anymore. I think you're on a journey to discover who you are, just like me, only you're more afraid of change than I am." Mason — Ruth Cardello

When has the world seen a phenomenon like this? a lonely uninstructed youth, coming from amid the moral darkness of Galilee, even more distinct from His age, and from every thing around Him, than a Plato would be rising up in some wild tribe in Oregon, assuming thus a position at the head of the world and maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure self-evidence of His life and doctrine. — Horace Bushnell

I don't know what happens to our consciousness when we're unwound," says Connor. "I don't even know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this." He pauses to make sure all of them are listening. "We have a right to our lives!"
The kids go wild.
"We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies!"
The cheers reach fever pitch.
"We deserve a world where both those things are possible - and it's our job to help make that world. — Neal Shusterman

There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers
the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy. — Joanna Russ

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.
You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads. Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you. — Rob Brezsny

You reach a point where the only thing that can shock you is to come truly alive again. To meet someone who kicks the aliveness into action in you, triggering deep, buried, intense responses in you that you have forgotten. You long to be suddenly breathless, pulsing with life like a wild flower that had come abloom, natural and nothing held in check, swaying to the breeze in abandon and finding resonance in the other. In a world of the walking dead, where your own aliveness is but a dull and dying distant memory, the probability of that shock is very low. And, so you relax in lives led, content in everyday mundane, growing weary of spirit, stifling that small voice within that longs for that shock. — Srividya Srinivasan

The poet Mary Oliver did this in one of her poems, brazenly asking, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" If you're afraid you've come to this question too late, you are wrong. Ask your Stargazer self. It will tell you what my fallen-noble friend Marianna told me in one of my darker hours: that the world is re-created in every instant of time, and this moment is always your life's beginning. No matter how many years have been stolen from you by your own ignorance, by cruel fate, or by the acts of others, you have a clean, broad slate before you. In this instant - this one now - you can begin steering by starlight, and if you do, the rest of creation will conspire to guide, teach, and help you. — Martha N. Beck

How do you get rid of unhappiness? You must release yourself from the prison you have unknowingly placed yourself in. Come to terms with the fact that there are things that you cannot control. But, just because you don't 'control' something, doesn't mean it's going to fall to pieces. That may be the hardest part. We get bent out of shape when something happens that is out of our control, because we don't understand why it's happening or where it's coming from. It's unsettling. You put your fighting arms up and prepare to battle the world. But, stop for a moment. Think. Where are all of these things coming from?
The world is not a wild, untamed place, where things are a free for all. Understand that there is a higher power running the world. — Leigh Hershkovich

The world,' he revealed, 'is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames.'
Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every colour. Some peoples flames are so still they don't even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can't look at them without blinking and if you approach, you shine in fire. — Eduardo Galeano

If I knew you were going to die, I'd make your last moment on earth last forever. I'd take you to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and make sure that you have the most romantic dinner your life. I'd fill your room with hundreds of wild sunflowers, so that even in death, you may carry the scent of something beautiful. If you were to die I'd make sure to drag you through an amusement park and ride all the crazy rides with you, eat all that ice cream with you, win all those stuffed animals for you.
If you were to die, I'd beat up every single person in the world who has ever hurt you. I'd protect you with my life. I'll protect you with everything I own, everything I have, everything I can give. If I knew you were going to die, I'd cut out my own heart for you. I'd cut it out so you could have it. So that you could live. Because I sure as hell can't live without you. — Anonymous

In this world, some time ago, far past anyone's remembering,women as a kind had done something so terrible, so awful, so fantastically cruel that they and their daughters and their daughters' daughters were forever beyond forgiveness until the end of time- unforgiving, distrusted, enslaved, made to suffer for the least offenses committed against any man. What was remembered were the terms of our survival as a class: We were to be docile, beautiful,uncomplaining, pure, and failing that at the least useful.bin return we might be allowed something like a long life. But if we were not any of these things, but a man's reckoning, or if perchance we violated their sense of that pact, we would have no protection whatsoever and were to be treated worse than any wild dog or lame horse. — Alexander Chee

The wild girl is with me always; she is my rage and my hunger, and if I live what passes for a decent life in this world, it is because I know to say no to the thing inside me that yearns, even now, to burn it all down. — Mary Stewart Atwell

Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith - my lack of faith - but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day — Dan Simmons

No matter how great the guy, something always went wrong with her love life. She stupidly longed for a connection to someone. A connection no one could reach. She flew too high, followed her own path, and got lost in the wonders of the world. No one would ever accompany her on wild, exuberant journeys. Least of all a ranger with his feet firmly planted on the ground. — Beth Caudill

At ten, she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls; her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and colour, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence. Her love of dirt gave away to inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart. To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever imagine. — Jane Austen

Life - life - let there be life!
Better a thousand times the roaring hours
When wave and wind,
Like the Arch-Murderer in flight
From the Avenger at his heel,
Storm through the desolate fastnesses
And wild waste places of the world! — William Ernest Henley

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light!
Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth.
The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light.
The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion.
Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad. — Rabindranath Tagore

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever? — Mary Oliver

Every wild thing is in tune with its surroundings, awake to its fate and in absolute harmony with the planet. Their attention is focused totally outwards. Humans, on the other hand, tend to focus introspectively on their own lives too often, brooding and magnifying problems that the animal kingdom would not waste a millisecond of energy upon. To most people, the magnificent order of the natural world where life and death actually mean something has become unrecognizable. — Lawrence Anthony

There she stands before me, and old woman with an anxious, care-worn face. Her hands are clasped - weary, toil-worn hands with a soft, wrinkled skin, where the veins stand out bluish; hands become so for my sake. - I never thought of that before. There is a lot I did not think of before; I was too young. But now I understand how it is that to this withered, little woman I am something different from any other soldier in the world: I am her child. To her I have always remained so, even as a soldier. In the war she has seen only a pack of wild beasts threatening the life of her child. It has never occurred to her that this same threatened child has been just such another wild beast to the children of yet other mothers. My — Erich Maria Remarque

In the years of my life, nothing extraordinary had happened to me. Not until Jack.
Not until this man, this man who could have anyone - who by all accounts had had lots of anyones - had begun to peruse me. His interest in me was so unexpected, and yet felt so right. I did not know why, but unlike anyone before him, he made me feel special, he made me feel like I stood out from all the women in the world. And he made me want to do lots of wild and crazy and extraordinary things. — Dorothy Koomson

Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details. — Yehuda Amichai

Egypt is a fertile valley of rich river soil, low-lying, warm, monotonous, a slow-flowing river, and beyond the limitless desert. Greece is a country of sparse fertility and keen, cold winters, all hills and mountains sharp cut in stone, where strong men must work hard to get their bread. And while Egypt submitted and suffered and turned her face toward death, Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life. For somewhere among those steep stone mountains, in little sheltered valleys where the great hills were ramparts to defend, and men could have security for peace and happy living, something quite new came into the world: the joy of life found expression. Perhaps it was born there, among the shepherds pasturing their flocks where the wild flowers made a glory on the hillside; among the sailors on a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air. — Edith Hamilton

Disconnection, separation, division, detachment, disassociation - these are all words that describe
the way we view our world and ourselves. We are disconnected from the Earth herself, separated from the
delicate web she has woven, divided from each other by arbitrary encumbrances, detached from the very
meaning of our existence, and disassociated from the awe and mystery of the world and the universe. Our
daily lives are filled with more events than our elaborate datebooks can contain, we live by the litany "oh,
that there were only more hours in the day," and we bemoan our lot in life. We are scared to death of spiders
and cockroaches, consider the natural world as wild, untamed and therefore dangerous, and resist awareness
into the intricacies of our world for fear of having to take on one more responsibility. — Jackie Alan Giuliano

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. — Ann Voskamp

God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.
Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life ... upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man. — Jorge Luis Borges

So many things that are so dramatic or exciting when you read about them actually happen so simply and quietly. We humans like to consider ourselves important to creation and to the world, and we expect that whenever death comes it should be with a crash of thunder and wild shouts or something, or with soft music around and people looking grave and serious. We always have it that way in the theatre because it makes us believe in our importance. Most of our life is a matter of dressing ourselves up to believe in just that, dressing ourselves in attractive clothes, in titles, in reputations. Actually, at base we all realize that we're just a frightened bundle of animals, still afraid of the unknown, and still afraid of thousands of things that can separate us from life, and trying to shield ourselves from our own smallness. — Louis L'Amour

She's a gypsy girl living in a materialistic world,
Unattached to most things but in love with life itself. — Nikki Rowe

It was unbelievably wild. Some continued to shout threats in their outrage and frustration, while others, both men and women, filled the air with a strangely brokenhearted and forlorn sound of weeping, and the officers found it difficult to disperse them. In fact, they continued to mill angrily about even as firemen in asbestos suits broke through, dragging hoses from a roaring pumper truck and spraying the flaming car with a foamy chemical, which left it looking like the offspring of some strange animal brought so traumatically and precipitantly to life that it wailed and sputtered in protest, both against the circumstance of its debut into the world and the foaming presence of its still-clinging afterbirth ... — Ralph Ellison

The weather was cheerful, the breath of spring animating. She watched the swelling of the buds - the peeping heads of the crocuses - the opening of the anemones and wild wind-flowers, and at last, the sweet odour of the new-born violets, with all the interest created by novelty; not that she had not observed and watched these things before, with transitory pleasure, but now the operations of nature filled all her world; the earth was no longer merely the dwelling place of her acquaintance, the stage on which the business of society was carried on, but the mother of life - the temple of God - the beautiful and varied store-house of bounteous nature. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It was a bold, wild life for a faerie - most never even left their forests - but she was a bold, wild lass, and so were her daughter and granddaughter after her, and their place in the world was everywhere and nowhere, like gypsies on wing. No home had they but their caravans and campfires, and no family but the one they'd cobbled together of crows, creatures and kindred souls they'd met on their endless journey round and round the world. — Laini Taylor

Many wild foods have their charms, but the dearest one to my heart - my favorite fruit in the whole world - is the thimbleberry. Imagine the sweetest strawberry you've ever tasted, crossed with the tartest raspberry you've ever eaten. Give in the texture of silk velvet and make it melt to sweet juice the moment it hints your tongue. Shape it like the age-old sewing accessory that gives the fruit its name, and make it just big enough to cup a dainty fingertip. That delicious jewel of a fruit is a thimbleberry. They're too fragile to ship and too perishable to store, so they are one of those few precious things in life that can't be commoditized, and for me they always symbolize the essence of grabbing joy while I can. When it rains in thimbleberry season, the delicate berries get so damp that even the gentlest pressure crushes them, so instead of bringing them home as mush, I lick each one of my fingers as soon as it is picked. These sweet berries are treasure beyond price... — Sarah A. Chrisman

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. — Madeleine L'Engle

How, for example, after liberating themselves from servitude to the religion of God, the creator of the world and of Adam, which alone could hold them within duty and, therefore, within society, did the impious life of those first men from whom the gentile nations arose bring them to disperse in a ferine wandering through the great forest of the earth, grown dense through saturation by the waters of the Flood? And how, constrained to seek food and water and, even more, to save themselves from the wild animals in which the great forest must unfortunately have abounded, with men frequently abandoning their women and mothers their children, and with no way of reuniting, did their descendants gradually come to forget the language of Adam and, without language or any thought other than that of satisfying their hunger, thirst and the foment of their lust, deaden all sense of humanity? — Giambattista Vico

Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory:where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life. — Evelyn Underhill

Sometimes, when you live a life at such a wild edge, an extreme edge of experience, you can come back into the world - if you come back at all - with some essence from that experience that people find useful. — Gregory David Roberts

The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by "civilized" thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong. — Gary Snyder

We were all too human then, the vast ocean surrounding us and the tiny island we inhabited. We were two small beating hearts in this world, yet what we sought now seemed enormous. What we wanted and what could be created between us, a spark of life, so small and fragile, was too overwhelming to fully comprehend. My heart beat heavily in my chest with the weight of what we were trying for. — Meredith Wild

Why, I've been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me - the wild, restless, breathless, discontented soul of me - never sat down before in all its life - I say, until my frightened hand cuddled into his broken one. I tell you I don't pretend to explain it, I don't pretend to account for it; all I know is - that smothering there under all that horrible wreckage and everything - the instant my hand went home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went over me. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. — Jack London

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun

Adam Brown's zest for life led him down a few dark alleys and more than one dead end. Kind-hearted and wild, Adam led a life that lacked direction. God, a woman, and the U.S. Navy gave it to him. FEARLESS is a love story ... several love stories: a man for his woman, a warrior for his team, parents for kids, and soldiers for their country. There is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends. Be warned - reading FEARLESS will change the way you see the world. — Stu Weber

I'm a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I'm a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss - I am made of Cody, too - — Jack Kerouac

To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn't stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one's place in the world. To say 'I am here.' To say 'I am. — O.R. Melling

For death and life, in ceaseless strife,
Beat wild on this world's shore,
And all our calm is in that balm
Not lost but gone before. — Caroline Norton

What is it that a young man wants? Where is the central source of that wild fury that boils up in him, that goads and drives and lashes him, that explodes his energies and strews his purpose to the wind of a thousand instant and chaotic impulses? The older and assured people of the world, who have learned to work without waste and error, think they know the reason for the chaos and confusion of a young man's life. They have learned the thing at hand, and learned to follow their single way through all the million shifting hues and tones and cadences of living, to thread neatly with unperturbed heart their single thread through that huge labyrinth of shifting forms and intersecting energies that make up life - and they say, therefore, that the reason for a young man's confusion, lack of purpose, and erratic living is because he has not found himself. — Thomas Wolfe

I existed on my own terms. I was different my entire life. Some called me divergent, wild, crazy, unpredictable and unconformed - an apostate to the rules of the majority. I called myself God's creation and found purpose in the madness. When that day came, I didn't allow other people to dictate how I should feel or act. I learned there was no shame in imperfection because history had shown being different had the power to change perspectives and eventually the world. This is when I realized that flaws had responsibility. This was the day that I learned I was truly BLESSED. — Shannon L. Alder

The wild black scavengers of the skies laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. They soared high over prairies and mountains and plains, searching for the fulfillment of that share of life's destiny which was theirs according to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided 15 Animals reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regnans had created the world especially for buzzards. They worshipped him with hearty appetites for many centuries. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

I don't want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I'll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it's possible to be. I'm growing and I don't know how to grow. I'm living but I haven't started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it's like I'm not here in the world at all and I simply don't exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid. — David Almond

And this love between Henry and Fora . . . at first, it was a small, uncertain thing, like the glow of the morning sunos the horizon. And then it was its own wild animal, bucking against the world and anything that threatened it, so hot it could burn and sometimes did. And then it was quiet, as quiet as a snowfall, covering everything, certain of its place, even as it was certain it could not last forever. — Martha Brockenbrough

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller. — Isak Dinesen

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.
He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire. — C.S. Lewis

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man ... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. — Joseph Campbell

But when I accept the call of creative passion, I am a bold stroke of vermilion, a renegade hyperbole, or the wild fury of jazz violin. The world is a canvas to explore, a blank page to fill, and an arpeggio of waiting experiences. This moving masterpiece called "life" becomes intoxicating when it's lived as if it were art. — Jill Badonsky

Ronan was a national bad boy now, the wild boy who should not be left alone with virgin debutantes. Only, the world did not know it was Ronan who was the frightened virgin and Emily the drunken temptress on the night in question. He was beyond despair and had lost the will to live. He was a dead man walking, His heart and soul was ripped out of his chest. He would never get his decent girl now, his life was over. — Annette J. Dunlea

I've always been fascinated by science - anatomy, quantum physics, space and time theory. I don't understand these things, but the mystery is a part of what attracts me to them. That the world I live in now is complex beyond my understanding only encourages me to believe that there are wild possibilities in creation beyond even the things of this dimension of time and space. If this universe has alternate dimensions outside of our understanding, isn't it possible that we might exist in a life beyond this one, in another kind of dimension that is fuller and more alive than the one we know? — Bethany Pierce

Can you not see, [ ... ] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. — G.K. Chesterton

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done. — H.G.Wells

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us - to know
Whence our lives come and where they go. — Matthew Arnold

The center of my world is our love, Blake. Every joy...everything beautiful in my life I have is because of our love."
He closed his eyes, drawing me closer until our foreheads touched. He slowly lifted his, capturing me in a deep, soulful gaze. "You'll always have it. — Meredith Wild

It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear any mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages. — Jack London

She called herself an angel, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She lived every kind of life and dreamt every kind of dream. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free water. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself an angel, and her god was Beauty. — Roman Payne

Like a needle jabbed into your arm, reality stings you, hurting you more than your skin and flesh. You realize that you're nobody. The electricity's gone out, the darkness is your sudden enemy...you have to protect yourself from the dark. Otherwise the world goes out, along with the artificial lights from the power plant. The night once again disintegrates into atoms, changes from cultivated to wild, fitting itself afterward into its original black hues, its cat skin. — Georgi Tenev

Boneless with relief, she let him pull her forward, into the open air, into his lap. And in this wild darkness, in the middle of an empty earth, she grieved for both of them - indeed, for every human in this wretched world, who must face the trials life offered, negotiate the changes wrought by time. There was so little joy to cling to, so few certainties. Yet humans continued to endure. Continued to hope. The undeniable compulsion to survive powered them onward, like Sisyphus on his mountain. — Meredith Duran

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully
wild, generous, drastic
in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances
that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are? — Robin Morgan

A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right — Erich Maria Remarque