environmental contrast Quotes

God made the country, and man made the town.

Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he'd say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn't even see the stars. We'd have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them.

...heaven for climate, and hell for society.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

As a Scot, I instinctively feel a sympathy towards a culture which is based on generosity. It's very refreshing. Afghans think they're the best people in the world and their country is the best place in the world, and it's strange because you go there and it doesn't really look like it, and yet they assume that everybody else envies them.

Obviously, movies, you're often on location, out in the rain or the sun, in a real place where the trees and the cars are real. But when you're on stage, as an actor you're imagining the environment that you're in.

I think making things that aren't necessarily shiny, happy feelings, putting them in that environment is sometimes an easy way to deal with the ugliness. Like, I know that as a kid, that I found - I think I learned this a bit from my mother - that if I could be as warm around strangers, no matter how strange or what different environment I was in, that people tended to be warm back.

The point they (Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin, Gabo, the neo-Plasticists, and so on) all had in common was to be inside and outside at the same time. For me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter, or taking a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.

The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent.

We moved to Ireland when I was two and we settled in Killarney, Co Kerry. Where we were living in Germany is very industrial and very grey and my parents wanted to have countryside around for my sister and I to grow up in.

In Cornwall, it is quite possible to take a stride from the richest vegetation into the abomination of desolation. It has been said in mockery that Cornwall does not grow wood enough to make coffins for the people.

If you've ever walked a mile into a virgin forest - you know, like a deep forest where trees have been uncut - the energy is totally different from the shopping mall.

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.

You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth between your toes and know that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you tell to a pile of bricks? The bricks will not be moved (page 87).

The world is made of sugar and dirt.

I cycle whenever possible around London. But I travel first class when I need to fly.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.

New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.

I'd like to go to Africa, away from water, away from what's normal for us. When you put yourself in those places your life looks so far away. It makes a big impact.

Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.

The traveler fancies he has seen the country. So he has, the outside of it at least; but the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is brought close, face to face with the flower and bird and insect life of the rich riverbanks, the only part of the landscape where the hand of man has never interfered.