Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch.

New York: Pocket Books
1970

Why read it? a thoughtful analysis of nature in the twentieth century and man's relationship to it. A celebration of all living things. With nature becoming a series of statistics and abstractions, Krutch calls for a return to personal experience with nature. Krutch tries to awaken in us our sense of wonder at the miracle of nature and living things.

Quotes and Ideas to Discuss
"Life will outlive man."

"Red and green are primary colors in nature, the red of blood and the green of chlorophyll."

"Most insects never see their children; in fact, they are dead before their children hatch."

Tennyson: "Nature cares about the type, not the single individual."

"To be an animal is to be capable of ingenuity and of joy."

"Animals may not understand words, but they understand the emotions with which they are expressed, many shades of emotion."

"The killer for sport prefers death to life, darkness to light; he gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, 'Something which wanted to live is dead; there is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe; I am the spirit that denies.' "

"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal; when he destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman."

In biology class, "we are taught to dissect the lower animals but don't study them as living beings."

"According to a theory at least as old as Immanuel Kant, a purely aesthetic experience is possible only in the presence of something which provokes no reaction other than contemplation."

In response to Monument Valley: "Statistics mean little because the imagination does not take them in."

"Evolution implies the growing complexity of things previously existing in simpler form."

"Nature loves the race; man loves the individual."