"We have no choice but to understand ourselves and the movements of our lives in the run of evolving energies that is nature ... We have nowhere to live except in nature. Ruin that which is natural and we will soon lose entire track of ourselves. Lose contact with that which is wild and we fall out of touch with all that this animal we are is able to understand as actual."

Essay by William Kittredge in TESTIMONY: Writers of the West Speak On Behalf of Utah Wilderness

The charm and significance of a day are so subtle and fleeting! Before we know it, it is gone past all recovery. I find that each spring, that each summer and fall and winter of my life, has a hue and quality of its own, given by some prevailing mood, a train of thought, an event, an experience - a color or quality of which I am quite unconscious at the time, being too near to it, and too completely enveloped by it. But afterward some mood or circumstance, an odor, or fragment of a tune, brings it back as by a flash; for one brief second the adamantine door of the past swings open and gives me a glimpse of my former life.

From "Spring Jottings" in RIVERBY by John Burroughs