Top 45 Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

#1. Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #50764
#2. The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #71862
#3. Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #75155
#4. Every footstep we take, every action has a consequence. We breathe in weather, but we breathe out CO2. We're responsible for weather and for climate.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #78737
#5. Our urge to undo things must come from an idea that what we find in the natural world isn't good enough, that our tinkering will make it better. Spare us the scandal of improvement, I say.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #81541
#6. Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #153099
#7. 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.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #167144
#8. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #184728
#9. What people don't understand about the Arctic is that this isn't just about those other people, those Eskimos that have nothing to do with us. The Arctic drives the climate of the whole globe.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #251420
#10. There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #261558
#11. Perhaps despair is the only human sin.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #292834
#12. People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #320415
#13. If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #376120
#14. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #384188
#15. History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #394001
#16. To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #402251
#17. Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don't even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #434811
#18. I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you ... I feel as if I can think there.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #676525
#19. I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #695147
#20. To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #838743
#21. It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #846783
#22. Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #861471
#23. I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #890997
#24. A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #906684
#25. Twin terrors: to be awake; to be asleep.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #951207
#26. 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.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #991934
#27. A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1030123
#28. To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1065900
#29. I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know ...

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1087329
#30. Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1129025
#31. In 2007, I received a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant to go around the top of the world and talk to Arctic people about how they've been impacted by climate change.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1135927
#32. I designed furniture that pulled apart, folded, and broke down into neat stacks. Since arriving in California, I had moved four times and it looked as if I would move again. Was it the land running under my feet or my feet running over the land?

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1217679
#33. Ritual which could entail a wedding or brushing one's teeth goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with rushing, irreducible conditions of life.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1242710
#34. The fog lifted in the evening and a blue-black band at the horizon marked the end of the sea and the beginning of thought. Where does a beginning begin when nothing has gone on before?

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1258230
#35. True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1355169
#36. Some days I think this one place isn't enough. That's when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and be allowed to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destinations. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that everything is here.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1417237
#37. Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1432786
#38. To trace the history of a river ... is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1453328
#39. Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1494884
#40. Turbulence, like many forms of trouble, cannot always be seen. We bounce so hard my arms sail helplessly above my head. In evolution, wing bones became arms and hands; perhaps I'm de-evolving.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1554734
#41. Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1555019
#42. All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"
an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1601760
#43. How odd it is that sewing is thought to be 'women's work' when surgeons, sailors, and cowboys sew too. Yet how many female thoracic surgeons are there? And if precision motor activities are thought to be performed better by women, why wouldn't they make better surgeons too?

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1640460
#44. Like water, I have no skin. Only surface tension.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1815294
#45. Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

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Gretel Ehrlich Quotes #1874821

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