Ellen Meloy Quotes

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

Ellen Meloy

#2. Before Alaska came along and ruined everything, one of every twenty-five square miles in America was Montanan. This much space has nurtured a healthy Cult of Place in which people find perfection, even divinity in the landscape.

Ellen Meloy

#3. 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 ...

Ellen Meloy

#4. A map, it is said, organizes wonder.

Ellen Meloy

#5. There are people who have no engaged conversation with the land whatsoever, no sense of its beauty or extremes or limits and therefore no reason to question their actions in a place that is merely backdrop.

Ellen Meloy

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

Ellen Meloy

#7. 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.

Ellen Meloy

#8. 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.

Ellen Meloy