• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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• "As unpredictable as life may be, we have even less control over the stories they tell about us after we're gone."
• "A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears."
• "Leave this place better than you found it."
• "The land knows you, even when you are lost."
• "A bay is a noun only if water is dead."
• "This was an ache for which the woods had no medicine."
• "The difficulty of digging is an important constraint. Not everything should be convenient."
• "-- the trees are so old that my lifetime compared to theirs is just a birdsong long."
• "All things that were will come again."
• "It does not bear too much imagining, for in that direction lies heartbreak."
• "There is something tender in them, and open, as if they were emerging from the embrace of arms they did not know were there. Through them I get to remember what it is to open to the world as gift, to be flooded with the knowledge that the earth will take care of you, everything you need right there."
• "The philosophy of reciprocity is beautiful in the abstract, but the practical is harder."
• "The very last alder leans away from the thread of the trail, as if to set me free."
• "They look like they're trying to remember what it would be like to love the world."
• "Forgiveness was hard to find."
• "Ear of stone, will you hear our anguish when we understand what we have done?"
• "Alone is a word without meaning in this forest."
• "However alluring the thought of warmth, there is no substitute for standing in the rain to waken every sense - senses that are muted within four walls, where my attention would be on me instead of all that is more than me."
• "See the dark, recognize its power, but do not feed it."
• "The very facts of the world are a poem."
• "Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life."
• "Or maybe we walked this road tonight in search of absolution."
• "There must be an end to this."
• "There should be no washing away tonight; better to wear the grief like a sodden coat."
• "Aldo Leopold had it right: naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see."