Words matter. These are the best Jay Griffiths Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.
Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.
As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.
The woods are a place where children can go to think. Children gravitate towards these spaces. When I was a child it was nothing more than a scrubby little overhang under a rhododendron bush, but it was incredibly important to me.
Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.
All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African ‘wilderness’ areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.
The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals.
A functional media is as important to democratic freedom as voting.
Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.
I don’t write quickly, and I don’t want to.
If people can’t acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that’s their loss.
