Gretel Ehrlich Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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

Gretel Ehrlich
True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

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

Gretel Ehrlich
I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

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

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

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

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

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

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
Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
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.

Gretel Ehrlich
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?

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
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.

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
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.

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