Ruby Grace

“I remember the words of Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. 'They love to hear the old language,' he said, 'it's true.' 'But,' he said, with fingers on his lips, 'You don't have to speak it here.' 'If you speak it hear,' he said, patting his chest, 'They will hear you.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species

“What I saw that night was a world so rich and complex I was disorientated, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation.”
― Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook

“...humor is deliberately built into the syntax. Even a small slip of the tongue can convert "We need more firewood" to "Take your clothes off.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species

“And the code might ask of any harvest, including energy, that our purpose be worthy of the harvest.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species