Liz Stephens Quotes & Sayings

Still, it is surely true of all animals, and all conscious people, that the pain we inflict on each other is in some ways due process for living in the world. — Liz Stephens

People who have been hunting all their lives with no compunction to consider the exchange they make and the gravity of the trade, I don't know where to put them. I just remind myself there are too many mule deer for the earth to handle, and before my inner dialogue says we took their space, not the other way around, I try to change the channel. — Liz Stephens

On the other hand, we are not given a Book of Mormon for some time, just when Christopher had begun to feel insulted. It was analogous, he said, to going to a gay bar and not being checked out. He wasn't gay, but wasn't it nice to be asked? — Liz Stephens

Of course she'll move away from me, and likely from here, because she is my daughter, because she is a daughter in the twenty-first century. But we can be her fall-back plan, and her stash of memories. Her deep and wide past. — Liz Stephens

I've noticed there are overnight camping trips that are reenactments of that arrival. In the promotional photos advertising the trip, entire families wear costumes and indeed pull a handcart over the granite rocks and creek beds of the nearby canyons and back country. The kids learns how very little actually can be brought in one of these carts
no television, for instance
and the parents learn a lot more than they bargain for, I expect; how shallow our own civilizing is, and the iron grip you have to keep on the instinct to wheedle and blame and shove, and how tender our feet will always be. — Liz Stephens

Emerson writes that "no one expects the days to be gods." But now, as time flies and a baby will grow in a place of my choosing, I know. The days are gods. They are each unrepeatable and each a lesson in scope and wholeness, each worth honoring. I can hold and turn these days, consider their resonance, dim and bright moments, sound the depth and know the lullingly measured length. And know that for the time being my memories, and the days in which they are created, are not the only ones of which I'm in stewardship. — Liz Stephens

I am beginning to understand the way in which memories hold us, mindfully, to the earth, by the quality of attention paid that they require to be made at all. — Liz Stephens

On the other hand, there is the person in my family, who surprisingly is not me, who keeps nearly every scrap of paper she's ever touched, just in case, just in case the world is ending and everyone has enough food and water but needs ephemera, needs slips of paper, needs old articles and wrapping paper and tax documents and someone else's past to stand in for the past of us all.
I hover somewhere between these two worlds, saving some memories, letting others fritter and slip away. Down one of these paths, it seems to me, the obsessive compulsive holding on and the equally aggressive letting go, lies madness, and even I don't know which one. Culturally and personally both
who can say, which path leads to the better place? — Liz Stephens

It is the landscape that draws me and keeps me here, concurrently spare and breathtaking enough to empty my mind of chatter like hours of meditation I could never sit through. - Liz Stephens the days are gods — Liz Stephens