Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 58 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gretel Ehrlich.

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Famous Quotes By Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 148266

Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1425221

The retreat and disappearance of glaciers - there are only 160,000 left - means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by bit, glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 207355

Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1293210

Walking is also an ambulation of mind. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1057145

If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 577441

In 2007, I received a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to go around the top of the world and talk to Arctic people about how they've been impacted by climate change. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 858994

As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress being unfastened and dropping to the floor. Fog came unpinned like hair. On the beach cliffs, great colonies of datura - jimson weed - with their white trumpet flowers, looked like brass bands. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1936957

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2173191

How odd it is that sewing is thought to be 'women's work' when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn't they make better surgeons too? — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 700711

June marked the end of spring on California's central coast and the beginning of five months of dormancy that often erupted in fire. Mustard's yellow robes had long since turned red, then brown. Fog and sun mixed to create haze. The land had rusted. The mountains, once blue-hued with young oaks and blooming ceanosis, were tan and gray. I walked across the fallen blossoms of five yucca plants: only the bare poles of their stems remained to mark where their lights had shone the way. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1601138

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1055864

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2106943

Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don't even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 184516

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? — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1428370

Like water, I have no skin. Only surface tension. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 729037

I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1412049

I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know ... — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1411576

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1448935

All that's known is this: there is no central processor, no single computer. Nothing that simple. Millions of neurons process information simultaneously and in parallel, not linearly, but the actual chemistry and electrical properties of that integrative process are still being mapped. Even so, it seems odd that during the evolution of brain circuitry and thinking, the ability to understand itself did not get wired in. Such built-in innocence seems like a terrible oversight. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1507393

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1551678

I designed furniture that pulled apart, folded, and broke down into neat stacks. Since arriving in California, I had moved four times and it looked as if I would move again. Was it the land running under my feet or my feet running over the land? — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1912348

What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1677791

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1705399

Our urge to undo things must come from an idea that what we find in the natural world isn't good enough, that our tinkering will make it better. Spare us the scandal of improvement, I say. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1718470

Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends and I stole a boat in the middle of the night and sailed it out of the Santa Barbara harbor. Suddenly we were becalmed and the current began pushing us toward the breakwall. With no running lights and no power, we were dead in the water. Out of that darkness a steel hull appeared: it was the local Coast Guard cutter. My father, stern-faced and displeased, stood in the bow. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1163291

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"
an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1934292

The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1953886

Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1963795

Survival is as much a matter of grace as fight. The expression, 'grace under pressure' implies the attainment of equanimity and equilibrium. The fundamental durability of the human body surprises us because the pain can be so intense - yet pain is often transient and hides the tremendous effforts the body is engaged in to heal itself. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2040453

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2104113

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2109963

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2114981

A sense of panic ensued, but panic is like fresh air. The world falls out from under us and we fly, we float, we skim mountains, and every draught we breathe is new. Exposed and raw, we are free to be lost , to ask questions. Otherwise we seize up and are paralyzed by self-righteousness, obsessed with our own perfection. If there is no death and regeneration, our virtues become empty shells (199)
Ehrlich's A Match to the Heart. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 2240731

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 816889

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 152042

Some days I think this one place isn't enough. That's when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and be allowed to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destinations. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that everything is here. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 311500

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 324188

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 433819

Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we've been or how are bank accounts describe us. What's obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what's bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we're transparent to them and thus exposed - we're finally ourselves. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 438296

We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least - a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 554524

I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 600065

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 600937

The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 615666

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 622676

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 672355

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1375528

Perhaps despair is the only human sin. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 822061

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 823250

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 824235

Twin terrors: to be awake; to be asleep. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 937337

People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 956469

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 963178

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 967968

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1109026

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. — Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1208009

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1208905

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

Gretel Ehrlich Quotes 1284232

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. — Gretel Ehrlich