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American · 1837-1921 · 34 quotes
American · 1837–1921
34 quotes in our collection
John Burroughs was the American naturalist and essayist who, in the decades after the Civil War, made nature writing into a major American literary form. A friend of Walt Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt, he lived most of his life in the Catskills and wrote more than thirty books observing birds, seasons, and landscapes with the patient attention of a man who believed that the proper study of nature was the proper study of the self. His aphorisms circle the same insight: growth requires patience, failure requires perseverance, and age — like autumn leaves — has its own full light. How beautifully leaves grow old, he wrote, and the observation applies to everything he valued. He died in 1921 on a train returning from California, looking out the window at the country he had spent his life describing.
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