Top 70 Gretel Ehrlich Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

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

— Gretel Ehrlich

3. “True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

4. “Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

5. “Walking is also an ambulation of mind.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

6. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

11. “History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

13. “Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

14. “To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

15. “Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

16. “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

17. “Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

18. “Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

20. “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

21. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

22. “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?”

— Gretel Ehrlich

23. “There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

24. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

25. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

26. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

29. “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

30. “Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails – clouds streaming – and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

31. “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

32. “Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What we’ve interpreted as toughness – weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the eye and a growl in the voice – only masks the tenderness inside.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

33. “Lately I’ve had to redefine the word “knowledge” to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I’m dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

34. “Perhaps despair is the only human sin.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

35. “So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

36. “The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Everything in your world has vanished. You have no money, no job, and no hope of finding one. That’s how it is for thousands of people here. Please don’t forget that feeling.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

41. “That’s how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

42. “A writer makes a pact with loneliness. It is her, or his, beach on which waves of desire, wild mind, speculation break. In my work, in my life, I am always moving toward and away from aloneness. To write is to refuse to cover up the rawness of being alive, of facing death.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

43. “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

44. “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. 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

45. “My parents, who are older, think they don’t have to be careful, so they eat the most contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

46. “In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind – the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, “We weren’t born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

47. “Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

48. “Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

49. “Crush the rich, take food from the poor, keep them barefoot, hungry, uninformed, uneducated, and moneyless. That’s how a dictator rises to power.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

50. “We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there. OBITUARY One of the largest sheep ranches in northern Wyoming went under this week.”

— Gretel Ehrlich