Quotes by Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.

Night

Ocean

School

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

Animal

Light

Wind

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.

Cells

Garden

Rocks

All that’s known is this: there is no central processor, no single computer. Nothing that simple. Millions of neurons process information simultaneously and in parallel, not linearly, but the actual chemistry and electrical properties of that integrative process are still being mapped. Even so, it seems odd that during the evolution of brain circuitry and thinking, the ability to understand itself did not get wired in. Such built-in innocence seems like a terrible oversight.

Mind

Simple

Thinking

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware”–an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.

Autumn

Meaning Something

Sadness

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I’m all right so far?

Building

Fall

Stories

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Animal

Body

Giving

As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress being unfastened and dropping to the floor. Fog came unpinned like hair. On the beach cliffs, great colonies of datura – jimson weed – with their white trumpet flowers, looked like brass bands.

Beach

Flower

Weed

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Autumn

Long

Water

Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.

Curves

Distance

Ocean

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Animal

Appetite For Life

Arms

Art

Artist

Autumn

Beach

Blue

Body

Building

California

Careless

Cells

Cowboy

Curves

Dangerous

Departure

Despair

Distance

Dream

Dumb

Dust

Ears

Exposed

Expression

Eye

Fall

Fasting

Father

Feels

Female

Fierce

Fighting

Findings

Flower

Fog

Fragile

Garden

Giving

Grace

Hands

Hate

Heart

Heroism

Hiking

History

Honesty

Humans

Humble

Invites

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Quotes by Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich

A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware”–an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I’m all right so far?

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped; in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.

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