Margaret Renkl > Quotes

“What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of
our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never
needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all
there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will flood you with a feeling of well-being. The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.”
― 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

“Even now, with the natural world in so
much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.the”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are
reckless metaphor makers anyway”
― 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

“A person who is not afraid of looking like a fool gets to do a lot more dancing.”
― Margaret Renkl

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed,
we are only obliged to look.”
― 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

“Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn't freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“I was so absorbed by the task of planning for spring that I completely forgot how long the wait for true springtime would be. I was thinking about the scent of turned earth, the feel of damp soil. I was feeling grateful that nature always renews itself, given even half a chance. I was remembering my favorite part of planting: the moment when the seedling, fragile as any lace-winged insect or hollow-boned nestling, somehow shoves the clods of earth aside and makes its way upward and outward. Searching for the light.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“When I didn't die, however, and then didn't die some more, I came one day to understand: I wasn't dying; I was grieving. I wasn't dying. Not yet.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“We are storytelling animals, and for us that indeterminate space is uncomfortable. We turn the unfinished story over and over in our minds, imagining alternate scenarios. We try to convince ourselves that only the happy ending is possible, that any tragedies we fail to witness are tragedies that never happened. That kind of ignorance is a gift we give ourselves because we are made so uneasy by uncertainty. But uncertainty is the true gift.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“For us, too, change is almost always a source of dislocation, but if nature teaches us anything, it’s that nothing prevents the passage of time, the turning of the seasons.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“In years to come, will they remember with nostalgia what must seem even now like a magnificent chorus of birdsong pouring down from the trees? Are we all, generation upon generation, destined to mourn what seems in this moment impossibly abundant but is already far on its way to being gone? 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. Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty besotted will find a reason to love the world.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Hold still. Be quiet. Listen.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Hope is harder to come by these days, and I find hope more easily in brightness. "More light,"Goethe famously called on his deathbed, and I understand. In light, there is human companionship, bird song, a sense—however illusory—of forward motion. In light, the horizon extends before us, a tableau of endless possibility, while darkness allows all manner of doubts to burble up. When we have lost our certainty of purpose, our very understanding of ourselves, we speak of enduring a dark night of the soul. How much easier is it to give into gloom, even dejection, when it is the darkness that feels endless.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“To love a person is always to love in spite of the faults that intimacy reveals, and so it is with a place.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“I have learned to think of rest as a form of waiting, a state that is both passive an active, resisting
the urge to predict but prepared nonetheless for whatever might come”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The loss you don't know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“We, too, will live. In the morning we will wake and rejoice, for we are once more among the living.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The fireflies come out to fill the forest just as the stars come out to fill the skies.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss