51 Quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Earth’s immune system – its rapid response team of self-protection – becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

I’m filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.

I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.

I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page – it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.

I grow very impatient with prose writers who don’t pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you’re wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice.

What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.

We’re facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it’s extremely important to bear witness to what’s happening.

I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I’m lucky to be alive. My face was stitched back together and here I still am, gratefully so. I believe that experience shocked me into a deep alliance with the animal world, its beauty and viciousness and terror.

I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament; in some ways it’s important to be the vessels for grief for all that’s being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking.