That sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate

How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain lowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 212

Primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilisation, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth,  and primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing. If civilisation has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 101

Unproof is the ground of action

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p.70

The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

[...]

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find – if it's a good novel – that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But its' very hard to say just what we learned, how we are changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Introduction' in The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. xvi

The old wild is dead. But the new wild is flourishing.

The old wild is dead. But the new wild is flourishing, and will do better if we allow it to have its head. [...] Nature never goes back; it always moves on. Alien species, the vagabonds, are the pioneers and colonists in this constant renewal. Their invasions will not always be convenient for us, but nature will rewild in its own way.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 250

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire

Rewilding efforts meet a human desire to see more nature on a larger scale than we have been used to. But if such efforts are to become something other than a large zoo or a theme park for scientists, if they are to be nature 'red in tooth and claw', open to evolutionary change and able to contribute to genuine ecological revival, then we have to let go and let nature take its course, however novel, however divorced from what we night like to think of as pristine nature.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 249

If nature is a kaleidoscope of species

If nature is a kaleidoscope of species, constantly reorganizing and adapting, then newcomers will come and go, often in largely random ways. They will fit in as they can, with no more likelihood of doing harm or good than natives. They are not good or bad, not at a special advantage or disadvantage. They just are. This doesn't mean there isn't any evolution going on. Far from it. There is growing evidence, as we shall see later, that the arrival of new species often creates a burst of evolution and hybridization among both hosts and newcomers as they learn to rub along. But the context is a dynamic, open and unpredictable environment, rather than one in which a fixed group of natives is working to some idealized perfect state.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) pp. 189-190

Everything is visiting. Nothing is native.

Almost the entire flora and fauna of Britain has arrived in the past 10,000 years. Everything is visiting. Nothing is native.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 108

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 77

Our life is frittered away by detail

Our life is frittered away by detail.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 69

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 59

A miracle which is taking place every instant

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 10

It is never too late to give up on our prejudices

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up on our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived And What I Lived For (Penguin Books, 2005) p. 7

They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: ‘This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 109

The spirit of things

I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and clocks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries.

Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. They’re all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we’ll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 9x