David Abram Quotes

25 quotes in 678 categories

• Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.
• Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them…
• A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.…
• Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the…
• No event for the Koyukon - or for most other indigenous peoples - is ever entirely meaningless or accidental, but neither is any event entirely…
• Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would…
• The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends…
• For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of…
• In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or…
• Does the human intellect, or "reason," really spring us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of forms? Or on the…
• We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
• Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils-all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.
• As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to…
• There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When…
• The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the…
• Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching…
• To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them,…
• If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon…
• Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.
• Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, weve overlooked the songful dimension of language so…

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