Katie Noah Gibson

“It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“I don’t mean to say that when a forest is gone you can replace it with a poem. When a forest is gone, you cannot replace it. But with written words you can bear witness, you can hold a memory of the forest for others to experience and celebrate, you can grieve over the loss and rage against the forces that have leveled the forest- and through grief you can fall in love with forests again, and through that falling, you can believe again in the human capacity for love and in the faith that we might learn to protect what we love.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it.
At the same instant, we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words