Paul Bogard > Quotes

“Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.
Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but ‘you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution, heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me-the sense of being lit by starlight- and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions- the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call “structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.
It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting on me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality.) Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“In these countless stars, in their clusters and colors and constellations, in the “shooting” showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found beauty. And in this beauty, the overwhelming size of the universe has seemed less ominous, earth’s own beauty more incredible. If indeed the numbers and distances of the night sky are so large that they become nearly meaningless, then let us find the meaning under our feet.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope, the moon seems- ironically- farther away…the gray-white moon in a sea of black, its surface in crisp relief, brighter than ever before. I am struck too, by the scene’s absolute silence.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“When I lie back and close my eyes, this farthest lip of beach right next to the end of the ocean feels like being up close to an enormous breathing being, the bass drum surf thump reverberating through the sand. Living out here with no lights, alone, you would indeed become sensitive to seasons, rhythms, weather, sounds- right up next to the sea, right up under the sky, like lying close to a lover’s skin to hear blood and breath and heartbeat.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere…and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren’t clearing and aren’t going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There’s the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“I linger near Galileo’s telescopes, then round the corner and stand transfixed: I did not expect this- a dark, cool room full of globes of the night sky from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Globo celeste, they are called in Italian: ‘celestial globe,’ maps of the night sky… I imagine him making another globo celeste, this one smaller, yet still exquisitely painted, still breathtaking in detail. It’s a map of the earth still flowing with creation, one you can spin and when you stop it with your finger, there is some tiny detail…some miraculous beauty, some wonderful example from each location at night. The white flower of a night blooming saguaro cactus, the feathers from a great-horned owl, the crunched, smiling face of a particular bat- here, I’m spinning it, I stop it at in the north, where I want there to be something still- he’s painted the black-and-white feathers of a loon…or a globe of night sounds, so that by touching your location you hear the night there- the cricket song, the ocean surf, the frog mating calls.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away…and I didn’t make that number up arbitrarily, that’s the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it’s attractive to no one. And if there’s a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn’t do it. There’s a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you’re touching that ancient core, whether it’s collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human…astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“To think that melancholy--which seems a natural response to the coexisting realities of beauty and mortality--is the same as clinical depression is tragically mistaken. Words like "sad," "gloomy," and "depressed" leave no room for the rich, dark quality of melancholy, which I've always seen as a sensitive appreciation that change is happening every second of our lives, that everything and everyone we love will die, and that in knowing this we have the opportunity to share our gratitude while we still do have time.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“Everything belongs to me in the night,” wrote Bretonne.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“I don't want fear so strong that I am incapacitated. But there is fear that comes from being attentive enough that you realize there is life greater than you, life that was here before you and will be after.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard

“And you could pick up the egg. And the little duckling inside had maybe just busted a very small hole in the shell, and you could whistle, just a peep-peep-peep at the egg, and the little duckling inside would whistle back at you. That was a big moment for me. "

--- Ray Norgaard, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“At least when it comes to light pollution what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.”
― Paul Bogard

“To feel all the beauty; not understand it, feel it. To see a sunset, or in the early morning when you see all the birds, this is something spiritual.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“fact, police in Bristol, England, reported a 20 percent reduction in crime, and other English towns have seen crime drop up to 50 percent since lights have been turned off after midnight.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“I follow the ancient sound of cranes returning at dusk, the great flights descending, coming in after the day of gathering energy from the cornfields, this wild, ancient ritual repeated here before me in a world gone so crazy and broken and out of control. All these birds that have moved across the continent longer than any other, that predate anything we have done, are here still alive.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“If we had a medication that did this—a medication that prolonged life, that addressed very different unconnected causes of disease, that did it at no cost and with no side effects—that would be the best medication of the decade. But we don’t have a medication like that except for this ‘vitamin N’—nature.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“fewer berries to pick in the summer, fewer animals to hunt in the fall and winter, less ice and snow—green grass in January, bees in February, pussy willow blooming three months early. “There’s so much not normal stuff going on.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“Outside our galaxy exist innumerable other galaxies—one recent estimate put the number at 500 billion. At some quick point the size of the universe becomes overwhelming, its distances and numbers bending our brains as we try to comprehend the incomprehensible—that our night sky is but one tiny plot in a glowing garden too big to imagine.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. —ANNIE DILLARD (1974)”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“the brain of the fly… resembles a grain of sugar”; “every species is a magic well”

--- E.O. Wilson, Harvard biologist”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“At twenty years or more Sand-hill Cranes are long-lived birds, and they will sometimes fly five hundred miles each day. For me, their migrations mean something similar to seeing the stars. They are evidence of something that includes us, but is bigger than us, of a force that goes on around us and without us.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“To go out at night was to risk one’s life, whether by a criminal’s hand or a misplaced step—cables strung across the Seine caught the floating corpses of those who had fallen off the quais or bridges and drowned in the dark. The new public lighting facilitated”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“regardless of what your beliefs about creation are, it’s still happening, there are stars being born, there are planets being born, stuff is still going on.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light