Once There Were Wolves Quotes

“There are languages without words and violence is one of them.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“If you truly think wolves are the blood spillers, then you're blind...We do that. We are the people killers, the children killers. We're the monsters.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“You must know monsters well, wolf girl.”
“I’ve never met one in the wild. They don’t live there.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“The world he describes, empty of wild creatures and places, overrun instead by people and their agriculture, is a dying world”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“All creatures know love, Dad used to say. All creatures.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I think it’s civilization makes us violent. We infect each other.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“A man’s anger, his violence, is no one’s responsibility but his own.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“this is the thing, isn’t it? This is the fear they live with now. The children in us long for monsters to take forms we understand. They want to fear the wolves because they don’t want to fear each other.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Men get taught to expect control but a modern society no longer supports that, so some men feel it slipping and it humiliates them. The humiliation makes them angry, and then violent.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I stop being a woman, a human, an animal, whatever I was. I am fury dressed in flesh.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I want never to leave this place. I want never to see another human again. I want it more than I've ever wanted anything. The aloneness is exquisite; it is calm.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“And if others won’t do their part in turning the tide then we must do more than our share.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“The forest has a beating heart we can’t see”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Death gets under your skin, you carry it with you. People can sense that.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I smile. “There are languages without words, without voices. I’ll teach them to you.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“She opens her eyes.
And looks at me.
I am halved and doubled at once.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“She's not a person, who understands right and wrong. You can't be angry with an animal, can't hate it, get revenge upon it.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“It is easy to tell myself that what passes between them is only biology, nature, but then who said love does not exist in the nature of all things?”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“It’s not a forest. It’s one tree. One huge organism. It’s called the trembling giant and it’s the oldest living thing on this planet, and the largest. Some think it could be a million years old. And it’s dying. We’re killing it.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“We stomped through the world and crumpled things where we walked, too human, not creature enough.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Trauma can create new patterns. I'm no stranger to this.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart. He said we might survive this mistake if we found a way to rewild ourselves. But I don’t know how to do that when our existence frightens the creatures we must reconnect with.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“You can rely on the land and you can work it, and you can feed it and care for it at the same time.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“What’s dangerous,” I say, “is the unwarranted spreading of fear.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“We all have that choice, and most of us make it. There is cruelty to survive, to fight against, but there is gentleness more than anything, our roots deep and entangled”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“Dominance often has nothing to do with size or aggression.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I don’t have anything to give you.” “Then take from me. I have more than enough.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves