Quotes from David Orr

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.

Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.

It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants

it's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium

Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.

There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress.' I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart." They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on "courage"—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, "all the difference.

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

We do not organize education the way we see the world. If we did, we would have departments of Sky, Landscapes, Water, Wind, Sounds, Time Seashores, Swamps, and Rivers.