Top 200 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. 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

152. “Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

153. “It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness” – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

154. “Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

155. “We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

156. “To plant trees is an act of faith.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

157. “It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

158. “I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

159. “I like to imagine that they were the first flowers I saw, over my mother’s shoulder, as the pink blanket slipped away from my face and their colors flooded my consciousness. I’ve heard that early experience can attune the brain to certain stimuli, so that they are processed with greater speed and certainty, so that they can be used again and again, so that we remember. Love at first sight.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

160. “Imagine that while our neighbors were holding a giveaway, someone broke into their home to take whatever he wanted. We would be outraged at the moral trespass. So it should be for the earth. The earth gives away for free the power of wind and sun and water, but instead we break open the earth to take fossil fuels. Had we taken only that which is given to us, had we reciprocated the gift, we would not have to fear our own atmosphere today.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

161. “His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

162. “They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick...”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

163. “Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

164. “That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

165. “I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

166. “Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

167. “A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

168. “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. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

169. “Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them. It is changing now.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

170. “It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

171. “Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

172. “Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

173. “Leave this place better than you found it,” she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person’s fire, with tinder and kindling.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

174. “Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

175. “To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

176. “The roots may spread out like a map, but a map only helps if you know where you want to go.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

177. “But isn’t play the way we get limbered up for the work of the world?”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

178. “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

179. “If you didn’t know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

180. “Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

181. “Both were women with feet planted deep in the earth, who took pride in a back strong enough to carry a load for others.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

182. “When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

183. “The still air smelled of sweetgrass hanging from the rafters. What words can capture that smell? The fragrance of your mother’s newly washed hair as she holds you close, the melancholy smell of summer slipping into fall, the smell of memory that makes you close your eyes for a moment, and then a moment longer.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

184. “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

185. “Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

186. “I smile when I hear my colleagues say “I discovered X.” That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

187. “We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

188. “A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

189. “The world is more than your thoughtless commute.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

190. “All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

191. “A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon – the colored afterimage – occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

192. “All those nutrients field the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds–the bottom gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

193. “On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

194. “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

195. “We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that’s where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms friendships.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

196. “With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

197. “Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. But I like the scientific names, because they are as beautiful and intricate as the plants they name. Indulge yourself in the words, rhythmic and musical, rolling off your tongue: Dolicathecia striatella, Thuidium delicatulum, Barbula fallax.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

198. “We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

199. “Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

200. “How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer