Andie O > Andie's Quotes

“Although they still have to learn scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Most years she nurtures a full crop of apples, gathering the energy of the world into herself and passing it on. She sends her young out into the world well provisioned for the journey, packaged in sweetness to share with the world.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“A compass: “To find your new path.” A packet of smoked salmon: “Because they always come home.” Pens: “Celebrate having time to write.” We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need. Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Of course, much of what fills our mouths is taken forcibly from the earth. That form of taking does no honor to the farmer, to the plants, or to the disappearing soil. It’s hard to recognize food that is mummified in plastic, bought and sold, as a gift anymore. Everybody knows you can’t buy love.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“A book that doesn’t mention my language or my country, and has maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an illegitimate child on Mother Earth. Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“They once said Palestine will be free tomorrow. When is tomorrow? What is freedom? How long does it last?”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“A Hamas leader named Nizar Rayyan was killed. He was buried under the rubble of his house with fifteen of his family, mostly his children, the youngest aged 2. On TV, I watched when a man pulled out a headless child, another with no arm or leg. So small I couldn’t tell if boy or girl. Hate ignores such details. The houses were not Hamas. The kids were not Hamas. Their clothes and toys were not Hamas. The neighborhood was not Hamas. The air was not Hamas. Our ears were not Hamas. Our eyes were not Hamas. The one who ordered the killing, the one who pressed the button thought only of Hamas. My brother Hudayfah was born deaf and mute.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“Dear teacher, did you know that after your burial, the Israelis killed five of your family in the cemetery? They didn’t like how you were buried, it seems, and hoped your family could improve with practice.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“The story that we are living here is something like an epic. When I think of the events of my life so far, being born just a few months before the Oslo Accords in 1993, and then the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the Second Intifada in 2000, the 2004 invasion of Gaza, the dismantling of settlements in 2005, Hamas winning the election in 2006, then the siege in 2007, the major attacks by Israel in 2008 and 2009. Then the seven-day attack on Gaza in 2012, then most aggressively in 2014 and, very recently, the May 2021 attack. It never stops. I don’t think that poets necessarily need to be living in a poetic milieu.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“And when I talk about Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats, I’m not talking about things they liked or wanted to bring to us. When I read them, I want to be there with them because I’m deprived of that nature and those things that exist in their world. When they tell me about the trees, the rivers, the clouds, the flowers, they are inviting me to live their experience, which is a very good way for me to travel outside Gaza. So I’m traveling through their poems.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“In other words, the poem is never an escape, it’s a return to a reality that is actually there. Exactly! It’s truly a returning device for me to be able to see these things again. And I think it’s also a beam that sheds light on things that I sometimes—I’m not talking about myself as a poet, but as a reader, as a person—see as normal, but these things are not normal. When I read and see things depicted in a poem that resemble what I see in my garden or in the street, I realize that we are living on the same planet as Wordsworth. The lemon in a poem, it might be the same lemon I saw on the tree; when he’s talking about the sun, it’s the same sun. I’m invited to notice and enjoy things that I usually can’t see when I’m afraid.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“or transforming them, lose their mental well-being, their psychological balance. If they can’t write, or deal with their nightmares by reading, by putting them on paper, or somehow sharing their feelings with other people, this deepens the wounds. These nightmares will continue to come up, in their dreams and their reality—it’s very hard. One way of dealing with it is just telling it to other people and writing it down so you can know what disturbs you. I often think of writing about all these hideous ideas and these hideous events and just setting them on fire, so that I can burn these nightmares.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“Of course, it’s very ironic that we in Gaza and Palestine read and appreciate and value American literature, and English literature, we study it, we just love it. And we try to imitate it, just as we imitate Arabic literature. But then all of a sudden, a rocket, or a heavy bomb that was paid for and manufactured in America, is killing, not only me, but the books that we read and studied in classes. That was very ironic to me. I”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“And I remember this girl, blaming herself because she was the one who insisted that she and her family go to the sea that day. So she blamed herself: ‘I was the cause. I drove them to their death.’ Another incident was in 2014, when four children from the Bakr family were killed playing soccer on the beach. I think the ball was the only survivor of that game.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“The median age in Gaza is very young. Earlier you spoke of asking your father for stories about your grandfather, and how important that was for you. But there are fewer and fewer people who have memories of life outside of Gaza. I’m wondering if you can say something about this. Unfortunately, it’s not only about memories of our grandparents, but it’s also their memories that are being lost, those are what we need to hear and memorize and then transmit to our children and grandchildren. But I’m also so saddened to think about my generation, our memories, being required or expected to tell our own stories of what happened to us in Gaza. I mean, for example, in 2021, 2014, 2009, or 2008. All the massacres and attacks on Gaza. Maybe our grandchildren will not ask us about Jaffa and Acre and Haifa. No, they will ask us about the 2014 war. What happened to you? What did you eat, which of your friends was wounded, did you leave your home, where did you go? This is a prolonged state of exile and estrangement and expulsion and ethnic cleansing. Our grandparents were driven from their homes and their cities, and any trace of them has been erased and replaced by something else, which is now called Israel. But we, their descendants, were also robbed of our right to dream and think about those places—no, instead, we are forced to live in the nightmares of our own current life. And they are creating more misery for us, wounding us again and again, so that we forget those earlier wounds in the face of the fresher wounds. The more the Israelis attack us, the more they are trying to erase the older memories. So it also becomes a matter of exhaustion.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The Theogony tells the origin story of the gods, the very beginning of Greek myth. Hesiod details the creation of the earliest powers – Chaos, Heaven, Earth – and then the gradual arrival of more familiar divinities: nymphs, giants, Titans. Gaia and Ouranos—Earth and Heaven – produce many children, including Kronos, who will be father to Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Their mother, the goddess Rhea, helps Zeus to overthrow Kronos, just as the latter had overcome Ouranos.”
― Natalie Haynes, Divine Might - Goddesses in Greek Myth

“Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“And there is no reason for me to be longing for this now except for the fact that I am looking up at the sky and thinking, again, of the most cartoon version of heaven—a place overcrowded with people whose names I have brought back to life, whose names I have scrubbed the dirt off of after long winters have weighed their headstones down with the treachery of the season. A place where the dead have nothing else to do but watch the living they loved and still love, watching all of the sweetness lurking around the corners we ourselves cannot see, shaking their heads as we deny ourselves our waiting miracles. This is a self-indulgent way to imagine the life after this life, but I have massaged all other meaning I can out of the sky, out of the shapes of clouds and the oranges and reds that fight their way through those clouds while the sun laughs its way to surrender.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“What you may learn is that there are places you can go where no one will pay attention to you if you don’t cause a fuss. Sink down into a big chair at the library for a few hours, and hold a book on your lap, and if you fall asleep, no one will be bold enough to wake you up. Spend a dollar or two at the McDonald’s and sit with a newspaper you swiped from the top of a trashcan, and that booth can be your booth for a little while. There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don’t summon any chaos while you do it. Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“But let us dwell on heartbreak and its subplots for a moment. For example, I would like to examine the admittedly childish impulse that exists when seeing an ex-anything in the throes of a new pleasure, a pleasure that you do not have access to. One that you could not provide for them, and even the pleasure that they left you to seek. I don’t mind bumping into an ex at the movies or while fumbling through the towels or toiletries at Target. In a small enough city, it happens. And with enough heartbreaks, every city can become a small enough city.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“unsure why any of us would pursue this. The anxiety of scrolling through our pasts, lightly, of course, so as not to trigger any dreaded accidental liking of a weeks-old photo (or even months-old, depending on exactly how down bad you might be).”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension