Joyce > Joyce's Quotes

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us—it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we’ve slept, the kitchens where we’ve cooked, in the food we’ve prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“I’m just saying, I guess, there’s another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. If you live long enough you quit chasing the things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“When you give yourself wholly to a piece of ground, its goodness enters your bloodstream like an infusion. You will never be alone the same way again, and never quite dislocated. Your heart will grow down into and back out of that ground like a tree.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“The energy on deck crackled as if someone had sprayed a fine cocaine mist into the air.
The biologists couldn't wipe the smiles off their faces...We spent the next five hours running into the sunset alongside six to eight hundred narwhal. If a group of narwhal is a blessing, this was a whole damn conversion.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth the same way I did with Fenton. I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it was face-to-face with my familiar koan: how to be with the incandescent beauty of the iceberg without grieving the loss of polar bear habitat its appearance implied. How to grieve the polar bear without loving it any less. How to let the sight of such a strange and beautiful thing as this floating jewel make me happy, as wild and surprising things have always done, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy?”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“There is something so pleasingly pure about having a task to be accomplished and then accomplishing it. It is the exact opposite of writing, and pretty close to the opposite of teaching. In both writing and teaching, nothing is ever finished, only finished enough to let go.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country