Eva Wolfie > Eva's Quotes

“One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The challenge always is to demystify, to decolonize.”
― Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

“Nature was passionate and unpredictable and could undermine the relationship between God and man, based as it was on obedience.”
― Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland

“What if the ants were the very ‘household spirits’ to whom the offerings were being made?”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…]
This is the grammar of animacy.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and the rhythm of the words.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

“Among our Potawatomi people, women are the Keepers of Water. We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf. “Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers,” my sister said. “We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?”
― Ray Gwyn Smith, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“The prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. The prophet disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“Mystery, I'd read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.”
― Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them suddenly all problems would subside.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“[V]iolence against women is a key element in this new global war, not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends but because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally important, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
― Terence McKenna

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Geryon was a monster everything about him was red”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red