George B. Handley > Quotes

“. . . it was the fact that in my memory he was always about to die but still alive that was the most difficult to bear.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Religion’s power lies not so much in the sermon as it does in the believers’ capacity to bring to fruition, through ethical and moral action, the spoken or written word of God.”
― George B. Handley, The Hope of Nature: Our Care for God's Creations

“I like the idea of my body joining the drainage, the idea of dissipating into water and soil, becoming fish and plants or quaking aspen green.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“I am as homeless as ever, but I no longer feel the old anxiety or the lust that this thought once inspired.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“A going back, a repentance, is also a going forth, a movement toward fulfillment whereby we remake the fragments of experience into a quilted whole.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Variety in contour is the rule of water left to run its own course as it spills over rocks, carries dead wood and plant life, turns back and braids itself around slight elevation. Its life, in other words, depends on chance, even chaos.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Our bodies no longer serve us as they once did as instruments of our living. Now they are excess baggage, things to be maintained so that we can continue to live as if they were irrelevant, as if we were not embodied biological matter, destined to the same fate as bracken dead leaves and the mound of rodent hair I found plastered by winter's snows against the front stairs of the cabin.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“It is a strange thing, art. Recreating the conditions upon which an initial shock strikes the soul, reformulating the elements of the world into a new world, only to have to acknowledge that the world never needed our impotent praise.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“. . . some environmentalists are saying that Mormons are antiecological, that they continue an ancestral pattern of destruction of the native qualities of land and water until it is all dammed and transformed.”
― George B. Handley

“Live simply and reverently on the earth, use only what you need and share generously with those who have less, learn to see the earth as a reflection of God’s love and glory, and learn to take good care of it as a way to honor the Creator.”
― George B. Handley, The Hope of Nature: Our Care for God's Creations

“Everyone wants their own Eden, I suppose, their piece of land after the war. The only difference now is that, like carefree recreation, few want a relationship to the water and soil that sustain them. For that reason, I would rather have my canals than my faucets and sprinklers. Water and soil now are for creating the illusion of living in a spontaneous garden of grace and bounty but not to be mixed with our blood and sweat. Instead of working for my redemption in the soil of my ancestors, I buy décor for my private garden. Anything to protect myself from ever knowing my own sins in the reflections of the waters. There is nothing to be seen in the transparent streams coming from my taps except the refracted form of shapeless white basins where I wash the invisible germs from my hands every day.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“. . . for a time death had me in its grip, had me thinking that nothing else was true of human beings than that they died, that they disappeared from among the living, and that was the end.”
― George B. Handley

“This is because in being remembered, the past is remade in my image.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“My problem was adolescent: every turn in the trail, every new expanse that came into view, pulled me forward and I felt like pouting now that we had to leave all of it behind.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“How could anyone confuse fatalism with love? Maybe the earth is going to die. But why not stay the hands at its throat? Doesn't the nearness of an end only make the interim sweeter, more precious, and urge more determination to not go gently into that good night?”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“There is no guarantee or enough time in one human generation to know that our best efforts at restoration will make sufficient difference.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life—a watershed. Seeing it requires something more than merely historical or aesthetic lenses. It requires the poet's eye.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“But what if what you thought you loved was fluid, elusive, complex beyond any reckoning, connecting you to the headwaters of the past and to the outflows of the future, to what lies beneath you, around you, and beyond your vision, placing you in time's flow? What if you must confess that you are perpetually engaged in a process of becoming placed, that love makes you vulnerable, that is is an affliction? Is not this a chastening love of the mystery of finding yourself on this earth, in this place, in this body, at this moment of time? It makes you as strange and as strangely welcome to the scene as anyone else.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“We wanted nature, but perhaps not this much.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“. . . the earth's uneven surface, its infinite variety, is the ultimate tomb of all human dust even as it is the womb of all human possibility.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Maybe there is dignity in accepting that we need nature because we need each other.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Maybe when we are young, it feels as if love happens to us. It is only in the wake of loss and the pain that love causes that we come to terms with the fact that love is a choice and a measure of our suffering. For that reason loving in the wake of affliction is also a profound expression of faith.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“It was Rilke who advised young poets about the wisdom of guarding the solitude of those we love. And then he promised: 'Once it is recognized that even among the closest people there remain infinite distances, a wonderful coexistence can develop once they succeed in loving the vastness between them that affords them the possibility of seeing each other in their full gestalt before a vast sky!' Young and poetic by disposition, I remember thinking that this was hard doctrine, and even now I am not sure I am always willing to accept it.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“The ugliness won't go away until someone steps in the water and pulls the garbage out”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“The sorrows of the body are what remind us that we are individual and idiosyncratic. But I think it is when we are surfeited by the body's ecstatic joys in the vast physical universe, our capacity for sorrow signifies something much more, that we are human and alive, with no end of companions.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“. . . the only real cure for provincialism is not dictated by our awareness of the size and diversity of the human family alone, but also by our awareness of the staggering size and diversity of the more-than-human community of nature.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“Worse still, although this place remains beautiful, its occasional ugliness is often enough to destroy my inner life altogether. My joys seemed to wither at the palpable sight of the substitute paradisiacal world I could see from our van, this world we have built for ourselves and this civilization that values and delineates unique lives but not life collectively, which is to say no life at all.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“The brown [trout] are like so many Mormons in Utah Valley, nonnatives who thrive in a transplanted New World to the point where native elements and diversity of cultural life are squelched. Fisheries keep plopping more sport fish into Utah waters, which isn't the worst of all possible worlds, but it can create what some ecologists call the 'Frankenstein effect.' Predation results, diversity shrinks, and the health of watersheds declines.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“So far the response around here has merely been to cry foul, either in the name of a materialistic secularism or in the name of a dogmatic political ideology, both perverted by excessive devotion to narrow self-interest and fear of the moral burdens of uncertainty. This is the reason why we need action guided by the best knowledge we can find but also by the highest principles of accountability to the gift of life. Science alone can't seem to make moral sense of our own nothingness, which is one reason why it is time to begin naming again, morally chastened by an appreciation of what our cartographic imagination has failed to understand.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“There is redemption in this work and play. It is not that I couldn't have had different children and a different life or that no other happiness would have been possible for me, but I tried haltingly to express something of my gratitude for the particular life we had forged together and for the particular joy of these children here in front of us. . .”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River