” We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men”
” Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”
“I have become a part of Cross Creek. I was more than a writer. I was a wife, a friend, a part of the earth. Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the Earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tenderness, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are not tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain; to the sun and seasons; to the cosmic secrecy of seed; and, beyond all, to time.”
“We were bred of our Earth before we were bred of our mothers. Once born we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend, or any human love. We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”
“Good is what helps us or at least does not hinder. “Evil” is whatever harms us or interferes with us, according to our own selfish standards.”
“Sift each of us through tghe great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman.”
The rosad goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagles’ nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other pewrches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffon. There is no magic here excelpt the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves
sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend amasses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the oreange grove. Any grove or any wood is a fine thin g to see. But
Child of the Rock Garden 