Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.

The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before?

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.

There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.

Perhaps despair is the only human sin.

Turbulence, like many forms of trouble, cannot always be seen. We bounce so hard my arms sail helplessly above my head. In evolution, wing bones became arms and hands; perhaps I'm de-evolving.

What Flaubert refers to as the “mélancholies du voyage” is like the sadness I feel as one season departs and another arrives.

Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.

Am I like the optimist who while falling ten stories from a building says at each story "I'm all right so far"?