Donald Culross Peattie Quotes

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If the plant, from lack of water, should be allowed to perish, one may watch its dance of death, as it twists in the throes of dehydration, droops its heavy head, and falls.

Donald Culross Peattie
Old earth is great with her children, the bulb and the grub, and the sleepy mammal and the seed.

Donald Culross Peattie
Weighted in their armor of cellulose, the higher land plants, it is true, have taken up fixed stations in life. So they have rather surrendered to the animal kingdom the proverbially broadening effects of travel. But they have not lost the power of motion. Like a dancing girl who expresses dance without stirring her feet, they too gesticulate.

Donald Culross Peattie
Species is but the ideal form; within this idea, within each species, is a diversity of individuality to make the stars look monotonous.

Donald Culross Peattie
The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.

Donald Culross Peattie
There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.

Donald Culross Peattie
The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.

Donald Culross Peattie