Amy Irvine > Quotes

“My home is a red desert that trembles with spirits and bones.

There are two reasons I came here: my father's death, and the lion man who prowled my dreams. Perhaps it was coincidence, but a man--half wild, ravenous beyond words--slid from the dream world into the mud of the waking one the same year my father left this world for another.

Ghosts. Paw prints. I have tried to stay put.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“I have scavenged for ways to put down roots here. I am perfroming the precise rituals required. Still, I have no idea how to claim the promised land, to gain any semblance of acceptance among its people. And I realize this is probably how I will always live--slinking around the margins--even on my own property.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“Our most precious resource now is wonder. What we wonder ignites our imagination, unleashes our empathy, fuels our ferocity.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“Now I believe that true lasting change and sustainability--cultural or otherwise--must rely on something more ancient and universal: art--any form that evokes the archetypal imagery that lives deep in the human psyche--can, in words i once heard imparted by the author Terry Tempest Williams, "bypass rhetoric and pierce the heart.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“God. Father. Lover. For each shaken source of faith, I have hoarded a seismic sense of hurt--a sensation that led to spiritual starvation.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“And, sure enough, saturation begins--the staedy work of seeps and springs. Then, suddenly, cottonwoods and willows spring from the sand, their leaves gyrating into a byzantine mosaic of greens. Birds, frogs, and insects trill out brilliant improvisations--a kind of critter jazz. And as the water gathers substance, there is the ballet of tadpoles and water skeeters across the face of clear ponds.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“The notion of genesis is precarious.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“These good white liberals want monuments and wilderness to protect the places they recreate, to keep out companies that want to suck the fossil fuels out from under the sandstone. But the oil and gas will be burned by and large by them, to travel to Utah’s public lands. And it’s used by us - you in your big red Cadillac and me in my Toyota truck - although I’ve recently downgraded to a more fuel-efficient Subaru, the preferred method of transport that’s most often frosted with bike, ski, and boat racks for outdoor enthusiasts across the nation.

The land and those who live off it know this arrangement breeds no symbiosis. We all want to get to, and get off on, a body corralled and commodified. Our orgasmic need for release and relief eclipses the fact this is the living, breathing body of the Beloved - the naked desert that has demarcated and delineated - ribbed, we believe, for our pleasure.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“Her tame words chase into midair any semblance of animal nature.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“Along with agriculture, it appears that the advent of these more profound and more permanent homes spawned a more dogmatic sense of ceremonial life, as if the increase in introspection was commensurate with the depth of the pit houses—the sum effect being more time spent underground, devoid of sensory stimulus. In other words, a spiritual life began to be sought at the expense of a sensual one.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“I will finally begin to believe wholeheartedly that there really is some other territory where spirits who have taken flight from their physical bodies ultimately reside.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“And there I am, my body shrinking away from his hungry grasp. The photo reflects just how threatened I grew to be by my husband's animal appetites, by the very maleness of him. I forgot that his natural lusts and longings were bound by an equally natural sense of love and loyalty. But it was inevitable, I had come to fear the corresponding aspects in myself.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“Sure, I've worried that this will be yet another year in which I'll somehow convince myself, as in every other year, every other relationship, that whatever I see in him must be a mirage - a projection of my own thirst. I worry that this will be as bad as selling off land to oil companies, and offering up land to recreationists who think they are in love with the idea of wilderness, of preservation, but really have the worst carbon footprint of all. I worry there will be toxic waste. I worry that the prehistory - the way I was before these casualties - will be erased, and I'll never claim the whole human I once was.

This is the grand illusion. That we were once whole. That our ecosystems were intact, self-sustaining. That everything we need is within - and to need others is as vampiric as drilling for every last drop of oil.

If this is why we seek solitude, we are in danger of extinction.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“By nature, we are a cabal.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“To truly inhabit a place is to learn to dwell with the differences that threaten to divide it. Otherwise, one beckons monotony.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“If we objectify, we can enjoy. To love any more deeply is to love in a way that devastates.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness