Time & Perspective Quote by Alice Hoffman

Hoffman’s line lands like a gentle rebuke to the modern fantasy of mastery: that we can firewall ourselves from the planet with enough technology, money, or cleverness. The phrase “bound to, and by, nature” does double duty. It’s affectionate and restrictive at once, a reminder that the relationship isn’t optional. Nature isn’t just a scenic backdrop; it’s the contract we’re born into, and the fine print is weather, water, and limits.

Her pivot to denial is the tell. “We may want to deny this connection” isn’t scolding so much as diagnosing a cultural habit: treating the external world as a controllable accessory. The subtext is about hubris, but also about comfort. Believing we “control” things lets us keep living as if consequences are negotiable. Hoffman punctures that illusion with two plain, domestic-sounding intrusions: “snowstorm or drought.” Not apocalypse imagery, not abstract climate graphs. Just the kind of events that collapse our schedules, strain our systems, and reveal how thin our control really is.

Contextually, this reads as a novelist’s ecological realism: the insistence that the environment is a character with agency, not a setting. The line also feels calibrated for an era when climate change has turned “freak weather” into recurring plot. “Fate” is the sharpest word here, smuggling in moral weight. It suggests that what we call natural disaster is often a mirror held up to human choices, and that the world around us isn’t around us at all; it’s the conditions of our lives.