18 Quotes by Amy Leach

Living in a galaxy is like living in a neighborhood where the house down the street might have burned down four thousand years ago but you wouldn't know it for another three thousand years.

Why should conversation always be so much more coherent than experience?

Perhaps it was smartest, after all, to collar your memories and isolate them, sedating the irascible ones, banishing the grotesques, systematizing the rest; maybe coaxing a lion into a wheeled cage on occasion and pulling it eminently around town for the neighbors to see. Maybe it was best to let only the shadows of your impounded memories touch you; shadows usually being safer than their begetters, as for example axes and icicles and porcupines.

Plants cannot stay safe. Desire for light spools grass out of the ground; desire for a visitor spools red ruffles out of twigs. Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire; and very tender, so they can feel what they find.

Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we’ve wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.

Whether people need nature or not, it was clear that nature needed people. But perhaps nature needs us like a hostage needs her captors: nature needs us not to annihilate her, not to run her over, not to cover her with cement, not to chop her down. We can hardly admire ourselves, then, when we stop to accommodate nature's needs: we are dubious heroes who create peril and then save it's victims, we who rescue the animals and the trees from ourselves.

The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.

Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.

A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun—the readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.