Gretel Quotes & Sayings

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

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

There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it. — Joyce Carol Oates

There was a huge wire fence that ran along the length of the house and turned in at the top, extending further along in either direction, further than she could possibly see. The fence was very high, higher even than the house they were standing in, and there were huge wooden posts, like telegraph poles, dotted along it, holding it up. At the top of the fence enormous bales of barbed wire were tangled in spirals, and Gretel felt an unexpected pain inside her as she looked at the sharp spikes sticking out all the way round it. — John Boyne

Gretel: Not the type of children I want to play with.
Bruno: I could come over on a visit and no one would be any the wiser. — John Boyne

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

Walking is also an ambulation of mind. — Gretel Ehrlich

No real fairytale scared me, but Freddy Krueger did. 'Nightmare on Elm Street' scared the living hell out of me, but no fairytale. Maybe 'Hansel and Gretel' a little bit when they were walking through the forest and they met the witch. But I liked being scared, I really enjoy being scared. — Lana Parrilla

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

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

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

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

'Hansel and Gretel' is one of the scariest stories ever written! Psychotic mother; stupid, inane father. — Maurice Sendak

It was November, that quiet, gray time of the year when you feel like holding someone's hand. Gretel had her own hands clasped together, like a corpse. — Alice Hoffman

I was going to make the little hound here part of your display, but you know, against all odds, I've found myself growing to like the little guy! You were going to be a girl transforming into a werewolf, but now I think you'll be part of my Hansel & Gretel display. I needed a trespassing little snoop! — Christa Carmen

For a moment he considered running across the platform to tell people about the empty seats in the carriage, but he decided not to as something told him that if it didn't make Mother angry, it would probably make Gretel furious, and that would be worse still. — John Boyne

My first break wasn't professional - I was in 'The Sound of Music' when I was five. I played Gretel, the youngest one, because that was what kind of took off for me in terms of loving acting. — Megan Park

In my opinion, what 'The Evil Dead' is to horror, 'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters' is to action-fantasy, with these horror elements and a steampunk-y twist. — Derek Mears

Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving. — Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are few things more pleasurable than a cracking version of Hansel and Gretel and a good scab. — Lyn Gardner

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

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

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

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

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures. — Gretel Ehrlich

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

He stopped at every village, every hamlet, every house and hovel he passed along the way to ask if they had seen or heard anything of his sister,, Gretel. But no one had.
"You mean Gretel, the old woman?"
"No, my sister."
"Gretel, my sister's baby?"
"No, my sister. And she's not a baby."
"I have a goat named Gretel."
"No! — Adam Gidwitz

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

Perhaps despair is the only human sin. — Gretel Ehrlich

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

We are like Hansel and Gretel, leaving bread crumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. — Gary Kovacs

Hans went into the stable, cut out all the calves' and sheep's eyes, and threw them in Gretel's face. Then Gretel became angry, tore herself loose and ran away, and was no longer the bride of Hans. — Jacob Grimm

[Minho] pulled one of his knives from a pocket and, without missing a beat, cut a big piece of ivy off the wall. He threw it on the ground behind him and kept running.
"Bread crumbs?" Thomas asked, the old fairy tale popping into his mind. Such odd glimpses of his past had almost stopped surprising him.
"Bread crumbs," Minho replied. "I'm Hansel, you're Gretel. — James Dashner

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details. — Anthony Browne

Hester glowered at her. "The biggest mistake a villain can make is to get caught up in revenge. Hansel and Gretel were two hungry kids trying to survive in the Woods. Mother thought she'd captured another pair of greedy, gluttonous brats, only to grossly underestimate them. Hansel and Gretel killed her because they had to. It wasn't personal." She glanced back at the old siblings. "Doesn't mean I can stand the sight of 'em, of course. But it also doesn't mean their story has anything to do with mine anymore. — Soman Chainani

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. — Patti Smith

It occurred to him that there were a lot of stories for kids with stuff like this in them, stuff that threw acid all over your emotions. Hansel and Gretel being turned out into the forest, Bambi's mother getting scragged by a hunter, the death of Old Yeller. It was easy to hurt little kids, easy to make them cry, and this seemed to bring out a strangely sadistic streak in many story-tellers ... including, it seemed, Beryl Evans. — Stephen King

As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch. — Charles Baxter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, when Bridget was in a particularly melodious mood, Sophie thought about stalking downstairs and pushing her into the oven like the with in 'Hansel and Gretel. — Cassandra Clare

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

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

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

I actually cook and eat real food, too.
No roast Hansel, no grilled Gretel ... I promise.
Angela from Angela's Coven #covenbooks — Bruce Jenvey

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

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

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

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 in Darkness:


This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas....

Now, far from women's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the fire in earnest. — Louise Gluck

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

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

For a momente she [Gretel] stopped and considered following the rain's advice. But then she shook her head. "You're being foolish," Gretel told herself. "Rain can't talk."
No, of course it can't. The moon can eat children, and fingers can open doors, and people's heads can be put back on.
But rain? Talk? Don't be ridiculous.
Good thinking, Gretel dear. Good thinking. — Adam Gidwitz

Hansel and Gretel had breadcrumbs, she had plastic spiders. Worst-case scenario, she could find her way back by following the trail of dead birds that had choked on them. — Jeff Strand

A memory: Isola as a toddler, sugarlump teeth, skin still smelling of milk. Hair that curled without use of an iron and sweet dresses that didn't matter were dirtied. When she was old enough, she demanded the usual suspects at bedtime: The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast.
Even then, Mother's contempt for non-Pardieu fairytales was obvious.
'Hmph,' she snorted derisively, folding up her knees to perch on Isola's bed. 'Listen to me, Isola. The original Beauty's just an encouragement to young women to accept arranged marriages. What it's really saying to impressionable girls is, "Don't worry if your new husband is decades older than you, or ugly, or horrid. If you're sweet and obedient enough, you might just discover he's a prince in disguise!'

Mother's Most Lasting Advice
'Never be that girl, Isola. Never pick the beast or the wolf on the off-chance he won't devour you. — Allyse Near

Dear Father, I already forgave you once. I read all your letters, which fed me crumbs of love and admiration. LIke Hansel and Gretel, I followed their trail to your door. But you have left me again. I have the whole summer ahead of me to re-read your letters, and to try to understand. — Susie Morgenstern

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

Like Hansel and Gretel whose trail of breadcrumbs got eaten~ your customer may lose their way once they have left your website and they may never come back.
An email marketing list helps you remind your customers of who you and your business are. — Nina Montgomery

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

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars. — Alice Hoffman

Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope, buy a place together upstate, renounce their sweet teeth, and turn into health fanatics. — Sloane Crosley

Soon Hansel and Gretel came to a little cottage. When they got quite near, they saw that the little house was made of bread and roofed with cake. The windows were transparent sugar."
"There must not have been a very strict building code ... — Charles M. Schulz

You see, Hansel and Gretel don't just show up at the end of this story.
They show up.
And then they get their heads cut off.
Just thought you'd like to know. — Adam Gidwitz

Luckily for you," he said, "you shed hairpins the way Hansel and Gretel shed crumbs. I followed your trail." He pressed a half dozen hairpins into the palm of my left hand. "Now let us return to light, safety, and society. — Caroline Stevermer

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

How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (break of contract). — Sloane Crosley

Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hands over hers on the countertop, then hooped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot.
'I just wanted to wake you up', he said.
Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever had been before was all over. — Alice Hoffman

I'm reading,' said Bruno. 'What are you reading?' she asked him, and rather than answer he simply turned the cover towards her so she could see for herself. She made a raspberry sound through her lips and some of her spit landed on Bruno's face. 'Boring,' she said in a sing-song voice. 'It's not boring at all,' said Bruno. 'It's an adventure. It's better than dolls, that's for sure.' Gretel didn't rise to the bait on that one. 'What are you doing?' she repeated, irritating Bruno even further. 'I told you, I'm trying to read,' he said in a grumpy voice. 'If some people would just let me.' 'I've got nothing to do,' she replied. 'I hate the rain.' Bruno found this hard to understand. It wasn't as if she ever did anything anyway, unlike him, who had adventures and — John Boyne

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

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

Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abbandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it. — Stephen King

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney

There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There's a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn't have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have been his heart. His success was like the witch in 'Hansel and Gretel' fairy tale: it fed him for all the wrong reasons, fattening him in all the wrong places. Dad deserved his success, he just needed a masterclass in humility. I could have done with one too. How special I thought I was in the silver Aston Martin in which he drove me to school some mornings. How special am I now, now that somebody bought it from a depot of reprocessed cars, for a fraction of the price. How special indeed — Cecelia Ahern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He's crazy," Bruno said, twirling a finger in circles around the side of his head and whistling to indicate just how crazy he thought he was. "He went up to a cat on the street the other day and invited her over for afternoon tea." "What did the cat say?" asked Gretel, who was making a sandwich in the corner of the kitchen. "Nothing." explained Bruno. "It was a cat. — John Boyne

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

In my books, there is no 'ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan' syndrome because if you look at the Hansel and Gretel syndrome, it was a mistake. It wasn't a duckling, it was a cygnet, and that's why it turned into a swan. The duckling should with any luck turn into a nice clucking duck and get on with its life. Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! — Maeve Binchy

Operation: Hansel & Gretel — Melissa McClone

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

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