It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.
Interpretation
The quote paints a vivid picture of a chilly winter morning, highlighting the eerie anticipation of the season's arrival.
In this quote, John Connolly uses rich imagery to evoke the mood of a cold November morning. The description of the hoarfrost and winter's presence as a 'bad clown' suggests an unsettling but intriguing atmosphere, inviting readers to experience the beauty and strangeness of nature as winter approaches, where the familiar becomes slightly ominous.
In practice
This quote can be used to introduce a discussion on seasonal changes in a nature appreciation group.
Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.
For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.
He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
Our planet's alarm is going off, and it is time to wake up and take action!
I never before knew the full value of trees....What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.
Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
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