Paul Of

“Mr. Johnson's character was not much more exceptional than his double chin.”
― George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical

“The ravens play individually, in pairs, or in samll groups; they circle high, dive, fold their wings, and shoot up or down with one or several of their fellows. They chase and frolic, tarry, turn loops; they make croaks, high cries, and rattling sounds. They do anything but fly in formation. They remind you of a bunch of schoolboys wandering down a lonely road, kicking a ball along. The geese fly mechanically, calling unvaryingly and beating their wings at a steady disciplined rhythm like soldiers marching off.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“To walk in the woods and not recognize the songs [of the birds] is to not hear them. To not think of the birds' uniquely beautiful and artfully concealed nests is to have the woods seem empty. Most of us are like sleepwalkers here, because we notice so little.”
― Bernd Heinrich, A Year in the Maine Woods

“We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer