Margaret Renkl > Quotes

“Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“After our last child left for college, I struggled. The full life it had taken years, decades, to build had vanished, as evanescent as the mist. They all came home for Thanksgiving, and I—who had spent so much of their childhood despairing that I would never again have a moment to myself—followed them around like a girl spurned but loving still, ashamed. They are building their own lives now, and when they left home to return to them, I took myself to the woods. Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair. Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too. Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear. I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The light that renders a crow incandescent in the afternoon is the same light that only minutes later tenders the gift of twilight, when colors fade and all the world becomes a crow.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“the dew lingers longer in the morning, and the trees hold on to the clouds, stitching them to the earth, pulling them closer to the ground.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I like to see books spread out on a table like a banquet. Every time I pass by, I’m tempted to sit down and begin something delicious, or to pick up where I left off the last time I played hooky from work, the work that colonizes most of the rooms in our own house.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I never deadhead the coneflowers, though, for there are few things more beautiful than the sight of a goldfinch still wearing his summer finery and riding a coneflower tossing in the autumn wind.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I don’t expect to have thirty years left myself—I have lived long enough to see how unreliable good health can be, how easily it can be snatched away—but I persist in thinking that I have entered the last third of my life. I just put the emphasis on last and not on third.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“World, world, forgive our ignorance and our foolish fears. Absolve us of our anger and our error. In your boundless gift for renewal, disregard our undeserving. For no reason but the hope that one day we will know the beauty of unloved things, accept our unuttered thanks.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The gift of the equinox, the day when there are as many hours of light as of darkness, is the gift of Janus, of looking ahead even as we look behind.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“An actual vulture turns death into feathers. An actual crow turns flesh into flight.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway, and only a fool could fail to find the lesson here. The cold roots of the sleeping trees along the streambed are even now taking in water. One day soon that water will rise and spring into the world in a rush of tight green leaves poised to unfurl. Everything that waits is also preparing itself to move.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world a brightened dream.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me, too.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The next morning there was time before the funeral to wander around my sister’s neighborhood, the same neighborhood we moved to when I was in eighth grade and she was in second, the same neighborhood where our father had lived as an even younger child. I found the spot at the end of the road where rusted tracks emerged from the weeds, the exact place where my father had waited for his own father to step off the trolley after work. I stopped at the bridge over the creek where my eighth-grade boyfriend first held my hand. I named to myself all the neighbors who had once lived on our street, every one of them gone now, as a scent drifted on the air that I couldn’t place. Then, finally: gardenia! It blooms in profusion in Birmingham but not at all in Nashville, where I have lived for decades.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Unlike my sons, I am not ready to move past the past, but I am ready for something different, too, something new and urgent and thrumming with blood and sap and life. I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. —George Eliot, Middlemarch”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“An insect, its name lost among those orders of creatures who number in the millions, has somehow found its way into the kitchen sink. This is not an indoor bug, not one of the ordinary housemates who dwell in the corners of the kitchen cabinets, beneath the unmade beds. How easy it would be to wash this bug out with the pasta water in the pot that has been soaking overnight, but please hold back. Surely the world harbors death enough already. It’s too easy to choose ease, too convenient to choose convenience, but try to take the harder path, for the harder path is not very hard. The creature scurries into the corner of the sink and tries to climb the slick walls. Reach toward it. When it climbs into your palm, gently close your fingers around it. Be careful to hold your thumb to the side. If you never close your thumb around your fingers, you will make of your hand a sanctuary. You will make of your hand safe passage to the world.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty. Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again. Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly. A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“December reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year