Ellen Meloy > Quotes

“...to slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light.”
― Ellen Meloy

“Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“A map, it is said, organizes wonder.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“I would like to do whatever it is that presses the essence from the hour.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Breathing, it seemed to me, was a proper attribute for the mountains... mountains that quietly functioned as a single thing with a rhythmic inhale-exhale I could feel...”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Homo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own worlds, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer truth of them.

Each time I look into the eye of an animal...I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily, unmercifully confused.

There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come.

The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“ In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin.
Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist’s or a farmer’s skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running “heritage quests.” We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and the intricate flavors of their unaccountable tones and hues. I have yet to earn this land. Perhaps I never will. Home is a religion. Sensibly you understand the need for it, yet not even sensible people can explain it. - from the Chapter "Finding Home”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for us to truly measure up to this land, for this land not to be a battlefield of anger and greed. When these two opposing conditions, elation and despair, follow one another too quickly, the universe seems careless and precipitate. I soar, I crash, a squall of heat let loose in the ethos.

Or else I get hungry.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Everyone will tell you that genealogy serves two purposes: self-knowledge and social status, some sort of pedigree divined from names, locations, and achievements of eminence. However, there is nothing quite like an anomaly to suck attention away from the droning census records. A suicide hinted at emotion and thought. A closet door was flung open and daylight flooded a skeleton.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“I was a lowly puddle of plasma, trading “I am alive” for a vague “I tend to exist” and weeping for joy over the sheer revelation.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“This deranged jungle of ironies coinhabits my skull like feathers and fireworks. My heart fills with stones. I am the mad aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral. There rises in me the most inappropriate hysteria in this most somber of places.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“How do I stop this misery?” I groaned, scanning the shelves for a cure.

“Don’t go out there,” he said flatly.

I contemplated this reasonable observation for about sixteen seconds. Move to town. Hang out at the laundromat. Have eight children. Then I melted back into the pinon-juniper forest.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest

“In the hallowed tradition of squishy doughball liberals, I believe that science, reason, kindness, and understanding—maybe a little food—can set the world right. B”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“How does vision, this tyrant of the senses, draw someone to a piece of earth? What do the eyes rest upon-mind disengaged, heart not—that combines senses and affection into a homeland? Do the eyes conspire with other senses in a kind of synesthetic faculty, an ability to respond to the colors of place as if they were taste and scent, sound and touch?”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“The gyre that pulls this sunrise ocean moves west from Africa across the equator then caresses this thumb of land on Mexico’s flank. The Gulf Stream carries the warm waters farther north. Like the ocean currents, airflow also moves in a circular pattern, captive to the earth’s rotation, pulled one way or the other on either side of the equator: the Coriolis effect. This force can act upon the spiraling of water down drains, counterclockwise if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise if you are south of the equator. We are still in the Northern Hemisphere but just barely. My quest for drain behavior reassures me that we will not be flung off the spinning globe—you can never be too sure. On a flight to Australia once, when the airplane was precisely over the equator, I rushed to the airplane’s lavatory and filled the sink with water. Then I pulled the plug to see which way the water would circle the drain, hoping for some sort of momentous turmoil in the physics of deflection. When you venture well beyond home, it is important to assess the territory.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“La geografia dell'aridità è un prisma da cui emergono i più insoliti e complessi accostamenti di colore. I sederti hanno questo in comune, i colori. E sono loro a farci sentire a casa in luoghi simili, a darci l'impressione che il mondo non sia poi così grande.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Siete sognatori, e i sogni che custodite sono così tanti che di giorno, nelle ore di veglia, ve li portate appresso come pietre, storie che vi lasciano nella testa il sapore della nebbia finchè le pietre della notte successiva non arrivano a rimpiazzarle.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“The fear of being humble has walled all of us into separate geographies. Nature is a place “out there,” the not-home place, much as history is “back then,” the not-us time. We attend both by random visits. We grab a few souvenirs, then scurry back to our six-inch-thick bulletproof Hummers and race off to the familiar terrain of rampant late-stage capitalism. More often these days, we take both Hummer and paradigm into the “out there” with us. Never has hubris had so much armor.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“The only certainty is the certainty of what they leave behind: thunder in August, heart-crushing love affairs with the light, no money. How warm air rises from the valleys at noon and comes down cool from the high country as the sun goes down. How the ground beneath your feet shapes your muscles. How where you live—the locale—makes you who you are. I”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild