Nature

This passage is about Varosha, a resort town on Cyprus abandoned during the 1974 war.

The first thing he noticed was shredded laundry still hanging from clotheslines. What struck him most, though, wasn't the absence of life but its vibrant presence. With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was intently recouping it. . . . Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement. Streets now rippled with white cyclamen combs and their pretty, variegated leaves.

"You understand," Münir wrote his readers back in Turkey, "just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard."

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman

The first serious consciousness of nature’s gesture –her attitude towards life- took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time the stage scenery of the senses collapsed: the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what these energies had created, and laboured from eternity to perfect.

The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams

"The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exude nostalgia and the red earth lies stupified not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory."

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres