Quotes from Ellen Meloy

When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.

An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.

Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. "Without mystery life shrinks," wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. "The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.

That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.

It has come quickly, this crushing, industrial love of paradise. The pervert-free, less-trammeled, hundred-mile-view days were little more than two decades past, not so very long ago. Yet already my own history sounds like another country.

to slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light.

Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.

I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.

Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...

Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.

Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.

My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and the intricate flavors of their unaccountable tones and hues. I have yet to earn this land. Perhaps I never will. Home is a religion. Sensibly you understand the need for it, yet not even sensible people can explain it. - from the Chapter "Finding Home

Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.

I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading "I am alive" for a vague "I tend to exist" and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation.

When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?

For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.

This deranged jungle of ironies coinhabits my skull like feathers and fireworks. My heart fills with stones. I am the mad aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral. There rises in me the most inappropriate hysteria in this most somber of places.

How do I stop this misery?" I groaned, scanning the shelves for a cure. "Don't go out there," he said flatly. I contemplated this reasonable observation for about sixteen seconds. Move to town. Hang out at the laundromat. Have eight children. Then I melted back into the pinon-juniper forest.

Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.

Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a "cascade of consequences" precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.

La geografia dell'aridità è un prisma da cui emergono i più insoliti e complessi accostamenti di colore. I sederti hanno questo in comune, i colori. E sono loro a farci sentire a casa in luoghi simili, a darci l'impressione che il mondo non sia poi così grande.

Sulla linea dell'orizzonte, al crepuscolo, là dove la roccia rossa incontra il cielo blu oltremare, proprio nel punto in cui avviene l'unione, corre un nasto turchese adagiato sopra la grande terra scura. Un colore transitorio.

Siete sognatori, e i sogni che custodite sono così tanti che di giorno, nelle ore di veglia, ve li portate appresso come pietre, storie che vi lasciano nella testa il sapore della nebbia finchè le pietre della notte successiva non arrivano a rimpiazzarle.