Quotes from Jay Griffiths

Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own

There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell. But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun, which will melt the wax of the mind, and the fall will be terrible.

To me, the experience of having had manic depression can never be separated from my sense of who I am. It runs through me like wine through water: everything is coloured (or tainted) by it.

In depression, I feel I have been taken over and have lost my self entirely. Instead, a rude incumbent has slumped into my life, leaving half-eaten sardines under the sofa and stale smells in every room.

Manic depression is both artist and assassin. While it plays artist, it is on your side: generous, generating, connective and vital. But then the psychomachy begins, a battle between a God and a Devil for the possession of the soul, and the artist stealthily becomes assassin. In depression, the mind feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. The soul-loss of depression is well attested, and many people in the anguish of depression know that familiar cry: 'I hate myself.

wilderness is a ferocious intoxication which sweeps over your senses with rinsing vitality, leaving you stripped to the vivid, your senses rubbed until they shine. It is an untouched place which touches you deeply and its aftermath - when landscape becomes innerscape - leaves you elated, awed and changed utterly. Forget the lullaby balm of nature tame as a well-fed lawn, here nature has a lean and violent, waking grandeur which will not let you sleep …

For three weeks I was in a state of slippage, a gap widening between me and my usual self.

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence.

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.

I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.

If people can't acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that's their loss.

The woods are a place where children can go to think. Children gravitate towards these spaces. When I was a child it was nothing more than a scrubby little overhang under a rhododendron bush, but it was incredibly important to me.

Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.

The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.

I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.