David Odom

“I feel like that all the time, Sassenach," he said, his voice a little husky. His fingers curled over mine. "When I wake sometimes in the early morning, and I see ye there beside me. I doubt you're real. Until I touch ye-or until ye fart.”
― Diana Gabaldon

“That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house.”
― John Hanson Mitchell, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

“Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere-the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are-from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the planet itself had felt something missing, and at the tap of mind against rock, noosphere against lithosphere, the absent biosphere had sprung into the gap with the startling suddenness of a magician's paper flower”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“A native landscape enters a child’s mind through a meld of sensations: the smell of seaweed or hay, the sound of cicadas, the cold grit of stone. It is all heart and magic, confusion rather than order, but the feeling it evokes is wholly satisfying and lasting. Gaining this kind of deep familiarity with a landscape other than your native one is like learning to speak a foreign language. You can’t hope for quick or easy fluency. You work from the outside in, by accumulating a vocabulary of observed details. You learn where things happen in the rhythmic revolutions of the days and the year, which shrubs harbor families of grackles, which stands of beach plum send out sprays of August bloom, where the hog-nose snake waits for its toad, and the toad for its fly. Slowly the strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes precious.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, Birds by the Shore: Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast