Madison > Madison's Quotes

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you.”
― Bill Bryson (Introduction)

“The humble Cumulus humilis - never hurt a soul.”
― Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter's Guide

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Travels With Myself and Another

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity. —Amelia Earhart”
― Laurie Apgar Chandler, Upwards: The story of the first woman to solo thru-paddle the Northern Forest Canoe Trail

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“I have tried often to search behind the sophistication of years for the enchantment I so easily found in those gifts. The essence escapes but the aura remains. To be allowed, no, invited, into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowolf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist. When I said aloud "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done..." tears of love filled my eyes at my selflessness.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“I couldn't distinguish whether I was smelling the clutching sound of misery or hearing the cloying odor of death.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?

If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grown-up. Friendly, but never gushing, cool but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

“To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“The stars are always and constant friends, I thought. A hatful of constellations, learned when I was ten; those and the visible planets and a few stars, friends today as though not a night had passed since we met.”
― Richard Bach

“I'd have left my soul if it wasn't tied on with string.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“Whatever enchants also guides and protects.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“I felt like a moth and a chandelier--All at once there were lots of pretty choices, but I wasn't quite sure where to fly.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“Are all thoughtful people beautiful?”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story – A New York Times Bestselling Philosophical Memoir of Hope and Intimacy

“The light was different, like after a rainstorm, when the air seems sharper, gold or blue. A force that usually lay beneath life was closer to the surface, temporarily. It was letting them in on something, barely. It was letting them get some spooky, lucky sense before sinking away again.”
― Grace Flahive, Palm Meridian: A Novel

“Tova knew there was a bottom to those depths of despair. Once your soul was soaked through with grief, any more simply ran off, overflowed, the way maple syrup on Saturday morning pancakes always cascaded onto the table whenever Erik was allowed to pour it on himself.”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“Each trip it got a little more difficult to convince myself that the important things lay ahead and the things that remained behind would still be there when we returned. It was getting harder to dispel those second thoughts.”
― Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean

“Recognizing this duality, I realize more strongly than ever that the only way to handle this ambivalence is to fight the dark side--whatever it is--with short, sharp, intelligent skirmishes. Then you retreat, rest, and restore yourself and quiet, beautiful places. Thus you can gain strength and inspiration for the next battle. Perhaps that's why thorough wrote: "In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
― Anne LaBastille, Woodswoman II: Beyond Black Bear Lake

“If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.”
― Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation

“James Vukelich, an Anishinaabe linguist, teaches that these plant gifts are "a manifestation of unconditional love that plants have for people." Plants offer whatever they have, to whoever needs it, "saint and sinner, alike," he wrote.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Data tell the story that there are “enough” food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished. And yet people are starving. Imagine the outcome if we each took only enough, rather than far more than our share. The wealth and security we crave could be met by sharing what we have. Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyper-consumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. Can we imagine a human economy with a currency which emulates the flow from Mother Earth? A currency of gifts? When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem. We ecologists think about the currency of ecosystems in terms of biogeochemistry—the cycling of life’s materials, between the living and the not.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World