Author: Rachel Carson

Cited by

• Michelle Tan (1)
  • IN: The Confusion of Happiness (2014) Poetry, Singaporean
    EPIGRAPH: Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
    FROM: The Sense of Wonder, (1965), Quote, US
• Doris Lessing (2)
  • IN: Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: ...This minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms -- all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.
    FROM: The Edge of the Sea, (1950), Book, US
  • IN: The Four-Gated City (1969) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: In its being and its meaning, this coast represents not merely an uneasy equilibrium of land and water masses; it is eloquent of a continuing change now actually in progress, a change being brought about by the life processes of living things. Perhaps the sense of this comes most clearly to one standing on a bridge between the Keys, looking out over miles of water, dotted with mangrove-covered islands to the horizon. This may seem a dreamy land, steeped in its past. But under the bridge a green mangrove seedling floats, long and slender, one end already beginning to show the development of roots, beginning to reach down through the water, ready to grasp and to root firmly in any muddy shoal that may life across its path. Over the years the mangroves bridge the water gaps between the islands; they extend the mainland; they create new islands. And the currents that stream under the bridge, carrying the mangrove seedling, are one with the currents that carry plankton to the coral animals building the offshore reef, creating a wall of rocklike solidity, a wall that one day may be added to the mainland. So this coast is built.
    FROM: The Edge of the Sea, (1955), Book, US
• Salman Rushdie (1)
  • IN: Lost in the River of Grass (2011) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
    FROM: The Sense of Wonder, (1965), Book, US