Quotes from Gretel Ehrlich

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we've interpreted as toughness—weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice—only masks the tenderness inside.

Like water, I have no skin...only surface tension. (Gretel Ehrlich)

people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

A writer makes a pact with loneliness. It is her, or his, beach on which waves of desire, wild mind, speculation break. In my work, in my life, I am always moving toward and away from aloneness. To write is to refuse to cover up the rawness of being alive, of facing death.

Like water, I have no skin...only surface tension.

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.

In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind--the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, "We weren't born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.

Now what looks like smoke is only mare's tails—clouds streaming—and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.

Lately I've had to redefine the word "knowledge" to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I'm dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky

So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.

The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the "hum" in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.

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 be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

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.