Margaret Renkl > Quotes

“Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“What if resting, all by itself, is the real act of holiness? What if honoring the gift of
our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe? The natural world has never
needed us more than it needs us now, but we can’t be of much use to it if we remain in a perpetual state of exhaustion and despair.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“I stand at the window looking out, trying to remember the truths that nature always brings home. That what lies before me is not all
there is. That time is ever passing, and not only when I notice. That strife and pain are no more unexpected than pleasure and joy. That merely by breathing I belong to the eternal.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“Pull up a weed from the wet soil of the drenched garden and smell the rich life the earthworm has left behind. Just a whiff of it will flood you with a feeling of well-being. The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain the same way antidepressants do.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred
and distrust taking over the news.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are
reckless metaphor makers anyway”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed,
we are only obliged to look.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“Even now, with the natural world in so
much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.the”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“December reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn't freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“When I didn't die, however, and then didn't die some more, I came one day to understand: I wasn't dying; I was grieving. I wasn't dying. Not yet.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“I have learned to think of rest as a form of waiting, a state that is both passive an active, resisting
the urge to predict but prepared nonetheless for whatever might come”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“We are storytelling animals, and for us that indeterminate space is uncomfortable. We turn the unfinished story over and over in our minds, imagining alternate scenarios. We try to convince ourselves that only the happy ending is possible, that any tragedies we fail to witness are tragedies that never happened. That kind of ignorance is a gift we give ourselves because we are made so uneasy by uncertainty. But uncertainty is the true gift.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“The loss you don't know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“For us, too, change is almost always a source of dislocation, but if nature teaches us anything, it’s that nothing prevents the passage of time, the turning of the seasons.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows A Backyard Year

“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“A person who is not afraid of looking like a fool gets to do a lot more dancing.”
― Margaret Renkl

“But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin.”
― Margaret Renkl

“hate is sometimes a carapace for pain and who haven’t given up hope of turning hatred into love.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“And my friend the mole, oh how I love my old friend the mole. In these days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on, I remember again and again how much we all share with this soft, solitary creature trundling through invisible tunnels in the dark, hungry and blind but working so hard to move forward all the same.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“Everything surprised me. I understood that I understood nothing at all.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

“The fireflies come out to fill the forest just as the stars come out to fill the skies.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“Americans are now more likely to be shot to death than to die in a car accident.”
― Margaret Renkl, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

“The days are running out, faster and faster, and I have learned that every “yes” I say to something I don’t want to do inevitably means saying “no” to something that matters to me far more.”
― Margaret Renkl

“Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.”
― Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss