Jay Griffiths Quotes

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.

If people can't acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that's their loss.

In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence.