13 Quotes by Nathanael Johnson

I've spent a lot of time considering what lessons I want to pass on to my own kids...Rather than conquering nature or giving it fake human morality, I'd want her to simply approach nature with open eyes and curiosity.

In reality everything is a little bit poisonous. It's the dose that matters, not the poison.

It's as much human nature to resist novelty when someone else is trying to force it on us, as it is to open ourselves to novelty when we are seeking it for ourselves.

If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.

The aim of the book you are holding is to persuade people (myself first and foremost) to slow down enough to see the wonders around us.

Sometimes my mind snaps under all this stimulation and I enter a sort of fugue state in which I manically click from one window to another without accomplishing anything. It's hard to break out of this; the feeling is remarkably similar to the sense of being powerless to stop eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.

If people start paying attention to the organisms that are thriving, unseen, among us, I think it will change us for the better: On the political scale, we'll become more realistic and effective in our efforts to protect the environment; on the personal scale, we'll be happier and more full of wonder.

What's true of other people is also true of places: to know deeply is to love more. To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.

Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.