Eating Stone Quotes

“Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Homo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own worlds, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer truth of them.

Each time I look into the eye of an animal...I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily, unmercifully confused.

There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come.

The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“The fear of being humble has walled all of us into separate geographies. Nature is a place “out there,” the not-home place, much as history is “back then,” the not-us time. We attend both by random visits. We grab a few souvenirs, then scurry back to our six-inch-thick bulletproof Hummers and race off to the familiar terrain of rampant late-stage capitalism. More often these days, we take both Hummer and paradigm into the “out there” with us. Never has hubris had so much armor.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“The only certainty is the certainty of what they leave behind: thunder in August, heart-crushing love affairs with the light, no money. How warm air rises from the valleys at noon and comes down cool from the high country as the sun goes down. How the ground beneath your feet shapes your muscles. How where you live—the locale—makes you who you are. I”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. —Thomas Merton, from Raids on the Unspeakable”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. “Without mystery life shrinks,” wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. “The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild