Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.”
― Bill Watterson

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

“Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.”
― Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
― Albert Einstein

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
― Gary Snyder

“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Without reading, we are all without light in the dark, without fire in the cold.”
― Tamora Pierce, Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales

“Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.”
― Tamora Pierce, Sandry's Book

“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.”
― Wendell Berry

“If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“We always used to think it didn’t matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn’t going to be anything else.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“When we call a place by its name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed