Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Gretel Ehrlich
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

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

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

Gretel Ehrlich
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?

Gretel Ehrlich
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...

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
The music sounded flat — it had the kind of depth that comes from bitterness, not wonder.

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
There was not one cause for our internment, but many — a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves... like watching a tree grow.

Gretel Ehrlich