Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

22 quotes in 390 categories

• To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and…
• Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.
• Walking is also an ambulation of mind.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
• I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.
• Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.
• 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,…
• 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.
• I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
• 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…
• Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.
• 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…
• 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…
• True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

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