The Comfort of Crows Quotes

“What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of
our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never
needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all
there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will flood you with a feeling of well-being. The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred
and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Even now, with the natural world in so
much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.the”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“After our last child left for college, I struggled. The full life it had taken years, decades, to build had vanished, as evanescent as the mist. They all came home for Thanksgiving, and I—who had spent so much of their childhood despairing that I would never again have a moment to myself—followed them around like a girl spurned but loving still, ashamed. They are building their own lives now, and when they left home to return to them, I took myself to the woods. Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are
reckless metaphor makers anyway”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The light that renders a crow incandescent in the afternoon is the same light that only minutes later tenders the gift of twilight, when colors fade and all the world becomes a crow.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“December reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed,
we are only obliged to look.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“the dew lingers longer in the morning, and the trees hold on to the clouds, stitching them to the earth, pulling them closer to the ground.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I was so absorbed by the task of planning for spring that I completely forgot how long the wait for true springtime would be. I was thinking about the scent of turned earth, the feel of damp soil. I was feeling grateful that nature always renews itself, given even half a chance. I was remembering my favorite part of planting: the moment when the seedling, fragile as any lace-winged insect or hollow-boned nestling, somehow shoves the clods of earth aside and makes its way upward and outward. Searching for the light.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair. Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too. Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear. I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“World, world, forgive our ignorance and our foolish fears. Absolve us of our anger and our error. In your boundless gift for renewal, disregard our undeserving. For no reason but the hope that one day we will know the beauty of unloved things, accept our unuttered thanks.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway, and only a fool could fail to find the lesson here. The cold roots of the sleeping trees along the streambed are even now taking in water. One day soon that water will rise and spring into the world in a rush of tight green leaves poised to unfurl. Everything that waits is also preparing itself to move.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“We are storytelling animals, and for us that indeterminate space is uncomfortable. We turn the unfinished story over and over in our minds, imagining alternate scenarios. We try to convince ourselves that only the happy ending is possible, that any tragedies we fail to witness are tragedies that never happened. That kind of ignorance is a gift we give ourselves because we are made so uneasy by uncertainty. But uncertainty is the true gift.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“For us, too, change is almost always a source of dislocation, but if nature teaches us anything, it’s that nothing prevents the passage of time, the turning of the seasons.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I never deadhead the coneflowers, though, for there are few things more beautiful than the sight of a goldfinch still wearing his summer finery and riding a coneflower tossing in the autumn wind.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“I like to see books spread out on a table like a banquet. Every time I pass by, I’m tempted to sit down and begin something delicious, or to pick up where I left off the last time I played hooky from work, the work that colonizes most of the rooms in our own house.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“The gift of the equinox, the day when there are as many hours of light as of darkness, is the gift of Janus, of looking ahead even as we look behind.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“In years to come, will they remember with nostalgia what must seem even now like a magnificent chorus of birdsong pouring down from the trees? Are we all, generation upon generation, destined to mourn what seems in this moment impossibly abundant but is already far on its way to being gone? The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty. Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again. Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly. A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass. Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world's barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty besotted will find a reason to love the world.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“We, too, will live. In the morning we will wake and rejoice, for we are once more among the living.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world a brightened dream.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year