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Quotes from Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer

born 1953 United States

← All quotes by Robin Wall Kimmerer

136 quotes

To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Being a citizen does mean sharing in the support of your community.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

If you ask permission, you have to listen to the answer.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

To carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

We are told to take only that which is given.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Our histories are inevitably braided together with our futures.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.

Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Attribution

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