https://github.com/patch/lichen-quotes
A collection of quotes about lichens
https://github.com/patch/lichen-quotes
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A collection of quotes about lichens
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/patch/lichen-quotes
- Owner: patch
- Created: 2015-03-22T03:14:43.000Z (almost 11 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2015-04-06T01:16:59.000Z (almost 11 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-02-03T08:48:04.826Z (12 months ago)
- Homepage:
- Size: 152 KB
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- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
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Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
# Lichen Quotes
A collection of quotes about lichens.
All quotes copyright their respective authors.
## Edward Abbey
### _The Brave Cowboy_, 1956
> The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not
> merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every
> rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of
> dirty paint daubed on the stone.
### _Desert Solitaire_, 1968
> Here the canyon walls are a little wider, permitting the sun, for perhaps a
> couple of hours during the summer day, to shine directly down into this
> cul-de-sac. A rivulet of clear water pours into the pool; glints and flecks of
> light reflected from its agitated surface dance over the dark-golden walls of
> the glen. Lichens are growing there, green, red, orange, and along the seep
> line are beds of poison ivy, scarlet monkeyflower, maidenhair fern, death
> camas, helleborine orchid and small pale yellow columbines. There are no trees
> or shrubs, for the sunlight is too brief.
---
> I stand on broken rock, slabs of granite veined with feldspar and quartz,
> colored with patches of green and auburn lichens.
### _Black Sun_, 1971
> They walked over the gray rock daubed with green, red, yellow, rust-brown
> lichens, past the twisted and silvery skeletons of long-dead trees, and along
> an icy cornice of snow which overhung the inner basin. Down in there, among
> the rock slides, snow fields and pinnacles, were islands of forest, and
> springs and running streams, deer and columbines and purple fields of lupine
> and larkspur. Above them was only the sun, the solitary star in a burning
> wine-dark sky.
---
> And then, fighting the wind, like forcing a way through an invisible wall,
> they descended the ridge beyond, where there was no trail, and entered the
> inner basin of the mountain. Free of the wind, they picked their way down a
> talus of loose rock between towering extrusions of ancient lava—shapes like
> gargoyles, helmeted warriors, fin-backed tyrannosaurs in various hues of rust
> and sulfurous yellow, painted with lichens—until they came again to the order
> and sanity of the forest, the scented pines, the slim and virginal aspens, and
> grassy fields glowing with silverleaf lupine, larkspur, scarlet pentstemon,
> where small butterflies with yellow wings, like flying flowers, danced in the
> air and sunlight.
### _The Monkey Wrench Gang_, 1975
> Although the canyon walls are hundreds of feet high and often overhanging,
> there is little shade. Too dry for cottonwood. The only plant growth in sight
> is a clump of datura with wilted blooms, a dead pinyon pine, some snakeweed,
> and lichens on the rock.
### _The Journey Home_, 1977
> On the shady northern side of sandstone and lava we find green, gold, black,
> and auburn lichens in symbiotic clusters, patiently dissolving the rock of
> ages into sand and soil.
---
> Despite variety, most of the surface of Death Valley is dead. Dead, dead,
> deathly—a land of jagged salt pillars, crackling and tortured crusts of mud,
> sunburnt gravel bars the color of rust, rocks and boulders of metallic blue
> naked even of lichen.
### _Abbey’s Road_, 1979
> Untrod by cattle for many years, the sand bore on its surface a type of dark
> primitive moss called cryptogam. Dry, crunchy, but alive, this humble plant is
> of the first to begin the transformation of bare sand into organic soil.
> (Don’t step on the cryptogams!) Growing on top of the cryptogams, carrying the
> earth-making process forward, were clumps of gray and bluish lichens.
---
> “Why do lichens always grow in bunches?” asked Suzie.
> “Lichen attracts lichen. Symbiosis.”
### _Down the River_, 1982
> Near the summit of the cliffs, where the moisture is insufficient to support
> cactus, we see gray-green streaks of lichen clinging to the stone like a mold.
### _Beyond the Wall_, 1984
> Rock the color of raw liver, of rusted iron, of moldy sponge cake, of
> verdigris. Walls painted with masses of lichens in green, gray, yellow,
> orange, blue.
---
> I shuffle barefoot over the stones, pee on a clump of cryptogams—strange
> wedlock of lichen and algae—and watch their furry leaves exfoliate and turn
> temporary green, tricked by my golden stream into their preprogrammed response
> to rain. A crude joke, but it won’t hurt them; in this heavily alkaline soil a
> gentle shower of uric acid might even strike them as curiously refreshing.
### _One Life at a Time, Please_, 1988
> But good literary critics are plentiful, common as lichens on an academic
> wall.