“There is a delicate-looking plant native to North America called bleeding heart.”

“You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air.”

“The call of the yellow-billed cuckoo of North America is often mistaken for a bloodhound drinking a bowl of milk. He goes coulp coulp coulp.”

“Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.”

“Llily-livered, pansy-assed, bleeding-heart, wishy-washy, America-hating, namby-pamby Christian judgments don’t adhere to the teachings of Jesus.”

“Where would the would-be “purists” draw the line between native and alien elements? This whole planet was altered by the hand of man.A birder who scorned the alien Sky Larks might stand on San Juan and salute the native eagles . . . but some of those eagles had been released here; and they were living on an unnaturally high population of rabbits, from another continent, introduced here. The rabbits, in turn, were probably feeding on alien plants from other lands that were naturalized here — if the San Juan roadsides were anything like all the other roadsides in North America. And we birders of European descent were introduced here also, a few generations back. Even my Native American friends of the night before could claim to be “native” in only a relative sense; their ancestors had come across the Bering land bridge from Asia. None of us is native here.”