Amy Leach Quotes

Plants cannot stay safe. Desire for light spools grass out of the ground; desire for a visitor spools red ruffles out of twigs. Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire; and very tender, so they can feel what they find.

Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we've wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.

If you decide to stop flying, it is wise to hang on to your wings, for you may need them one day, when one of your other qualities turns dangerous.

Many caterpillars defend themselves not by striking fear in the hearts of their predators, but rather indifference. The large maple spanworm looks like a twig; the viceroy caterpillar looks like a bird dropping. This is not as exciting as looking like an anaconda, but when you are very small, and wingless, one of your main goals in life is to not be exciting. And speaking of unexciting - I think it is safe to say that woolly bears have one of the least advanced defense mechanisms among insects, although theirs is the reaction with which I most strongly identify: when distressed, the woolly bear rolls up into a ball.

FIREFLAKES: The stars; as transitory as snowflakes only their transitoriness is protracted.

Entomologists use that word 'foul' often when referring to the flavor of a caterpillar. They are rarely more specific than 'foul' or 'tasty.' I expect that is because they are leaving the assessment up to birds, and birds have a very binary approach.

If ever you grow weary of concrete, so much concrete conversation, you might take your questions to the forest.

All bodies are radiant but not all radiance is visible: stars radiate visible light; planets and donkeys and couches radiate infrared waves. (If your couch is emitting visible light GET UP IMMEDIATELY!)

The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.

Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.

I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face - which will lead to expectations of competence - I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as "The Future" in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions.

There are some things you can do forever. Given a deep enough shaft, you can fall forever. You can forget forever, and disintegrate forever, and you can laugh for a very long time. But you cannot bleed for long - not you, not citruses, not twites or treepies, not orangequits or plushcaps or jewel-babblers, nor any creature whose vessels flutter with warm, swirling, cell-bearing plasma. Either your leak will mend or you will become void.
Only love can bleed forever; only love has endless blood. Only love's slender drooping tassels can bleed yet grow stronger, bleed yet grow brighter; redder, redder, never spent, never phantasmal-gray. Maybe, if it only gets kicked, then love is love-lies-dented, and in a few days it replumps. But when it suffers a terrible wound, love seems able neither to heal - to grow substitute tissue over its damage - nor to run dry.

A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun - the readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.

Nature has another power besides the power to terrify.

The air is a question and those who travel upon it travel in questions. When will I find what? Where is who?

In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collide - as with crisscrossing marching bands, only the interstices collide. (Oh to be like a galaxy, to mingle without wrecking. But then we would have to be composed of so much more sky.) The spaces between stars are so wide that thousands of galaxies have to converge before the stars will crash.

Molecule Trustees: The sun and all of us are molecule trustees, administering the molecules entrusted to us until they are passed on. Like any trustee, we do not own the property, nor do we decide who will receive what we stewarded. It might be somebody grumpy like Xanthippe.

Why should conversation always be so much more coherent than experience?

Even in rainier areas, where dust is less inexorable and submits to brooms and rags, it is generally detested, because dust is not organized and is therefore considered aesthetically bankrupt. Our light is not kind to faint diffuse spreading things. Our soft comfortable light flatters carefully organized, formally structured things like wedding cakes with their scrolls and overlapping flounces.
It takes the mortal storms of a star to transform dust into something incandescent. Our dust, shambling and subtractive as it is, would be radiant, if we were close enough to such a star, to that deep and dangerous light, and we would be ravished by the vision - emerald shreds veined in gold, diamond bursts fraught with deep-red flashes, aqua and violet and icy-green astral manifestations, splintery blinking harbor of light, dust as it can be, the quintessence of dust.

DRAGON-GAGGERS: Instead of swords, some heroes wield toothbrushes, say they are there to "brush the dragon's teeth," and then they poke the toothbrush into the back gaggy part of its hot tongue.

There are many ways to be transfixed, and no season is safe. If it is winter you may be transfixed by ice; if it is springtime, by fire-finch music or phoebes singing or the squeaky compositions of fox kits. And if it is summer, you may be transfixed, like Dryope, leaf by leaf, by clambery vine-winding love-bind. For love, onslaught-love, beleafs all things.