Top 200 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

52. “Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

53. “Among our Potawatomi people, women are the Keepers of Water. We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf. “Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers,” my sister said. “We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

54. “The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

55. “I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

56. “To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

57. “Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

58. “The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

59. “What is the source of this pattern? Why is the world so beautiful? It could so easily be otherwise: flowers could be ugly to us and still fulfill their own purpose. But they’re not.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

60. “A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

61. “It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

62. “From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

63. “As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

64. “The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

65. “Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

66. “How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity. Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest – to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

67. “Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one – with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

68. “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

69. “For in the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction. Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once, as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself – its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

70. “Balance is not a passive resting place – it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

71. “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

72. “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

73. “Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

74. “There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

75. “Old-growth cultures, like old-growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

76. “Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

77. “Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last – and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

78. “The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

79. “There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the “dialect of moss on stone – an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

80. “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

81. “But the world is still unpredictable and still we survive by the grace of chance and the strength of our choices.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

82. “They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy – all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

83. “It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood, that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

84. “Wait a second,” he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, “doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

85. “Plants are also integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

86. “What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

87. “I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

88. “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

89. “Weep! Weep!” calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

90. “The creek that was once a fishery for Atlantic salmon, a swimming hole for kids, and a focal point of community life now runs as brown as chocolate milk. Allied Chemical and its successors deny any role in the formation of the mudboils. They claim it was an act of God. What kind of God would that be?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

91. “To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

92. “Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

93. “Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

94. “The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants – a kind of mutual taming.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

95. “A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

96. “But I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

97. “Time can vanish in exploring these places, like wandering through an art gallery of unexpected forms and colors. Sometimes, I look up from my microscope at the end of an hour, and I’m taken aback at the plainness of the ordinary world, the drab and predictable shapes.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

98. “We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

99. “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

100. “As I grew to understand the gifts of the earth, I couldn’t understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to a flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer