There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) American-Canadian journalist, author, urban theorist, activist
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Part 4, ch. 22 (1961)
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Quotations about:
countryside
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An elegant Sufficiency, Content,
Retirement, rural Quiet, Friendship, Books,
Ease and alternate Labor, useful Life,
Progressive Virtue, and approving Heaven!James Thomson (1700-1748) Scottish poet and playwright
The Seasons, “Spring” (1728)
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"The matchless joys of virtuous love" in a loving country family.
Children can be taken occasionally to the country to see what the sun looks like as they are taken now to see a hill or a mountain. Probably many of them will not want to go anyway, for the country will be to them only what it was to the London club man: “A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked.”
Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) American educator, writer, critic, naturalist
The Twelve Seasons, “June” (1949)
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The comment at the end is sometimes misattributed to Oscar Wilde. Further discussion of this quotation here: The Country: A Damp Sort of Place Where All Sorts of Birds Fly About Uncooked – Quote Investigator.
