“If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”
― The Overstory
― The Overstory
“I love the people who exist already, and there are so many books to read, and so much silence to inhabit.”
― Motherhood
― Motherhood
“quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.”
― Upstream: Selected Essays
― Upstream: Selected Essays
“The world had six trillion trees, when people showed up. Half remain. Half again more will disappear, in a hundred years. And whatever enough people say that all these vanishing trees are saying is what, in fact, they say. But the question interests Adam. What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.”
― The Overstory
― The Overstory
“Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.”
― Upstream: Selected Essays
― Upstream: Selected Essays
Bustle Book Club
— 269 members
— last activity Sep 07, 2020 03:58PM
Each month, the Bustle Book Club asks an author to recommend a book they think everyone should read.
Emily’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Emily’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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