Skip to content

Quotes from Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer

born 1953 United States

← All quotes by Robin Wall Kimmerer

136 quotes

The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

What's good for the land is also good for the people.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The land knows you, even when you are lost.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The presence of our reciprocal love is hard to say good-bye to.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The South, zhawanong, the land of birth and growth. From the South comes the green that covers the world in spring, carried on the warm winds.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

We are all the product of our worldviews—even scientists who claim pure objectivity.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robin Wall Kimmerer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.