Islands, the Universe, Home Quotes

“Some days I think this one place isn’t enough. That’s when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and be allowed to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destinations. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that everything is here. — Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home (Penguin, 1992)”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Lately I’ve had to redefine the word “knowledge” to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I’m dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails—clouds streaming—and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“To yield is to be preserved whole. To be bent is to become straight. To be hollow is to be filled. To be tattered is to be renewed. To be in want is to possess. To have plenty is to be confused,” Lao Tzu wrote.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Islands are emblematic not only of solitude but of refuge and sanctuary, the way a small boat is an island in rough seas.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“its cold immensity mocking us as we lunged away into the dark curvaceous violence of the sea.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“That’s how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“What shocks me so is the detachment with which we dispense destruction -- not just bombs, but blows to the head of the earth, to populations of insects, plants, and animals, and to one another with senseless betrayal -- and how the proposed solutions are always mechanistic, as if we could fabricate the health of the planet the way we make a new car.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“When you’re riding, it should look like a bird flying,” Ray says, smiling. “Not a gut-shot bird … it should be smooth as silk. And I’ll tell you what it takes to accomplish this: self-discipline. We humans only know how to put pressure on. We’re good at making war, but it’s a hell of a trial for us to make peace. Peace means respond and respect, not fear and escape.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don’t even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can’t. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“I hold the Big Ben clock taken from a dead sheepherder’s wagon. The clock measures intervals of time, not the speed of time, and the calendar is a scaffolding we hang as if time were rushing water we could harness. Time-bound, I hinge myself to a linear bias—cause and effect all laid out in a neat row.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home

“I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead friend, if they actually talk to anyone, or were they simply meting out consolation at two thousand yen a shot? I didn’t care. We are always looking for difficult truths in easy contexts and demanding simple answers within complicated wholes.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, the Universe, Home