"I won’t be here when the worst of what’s coming comes. I think about it and then I try not to think about it. And then I try to think because if we don’t—but I can hardly grasp it. (on climate change)" — Ellen Bass Lighthouse, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
"The words that really matter in the wake of passing are the stories we tell of our loved ones. Stories fill up the space they leave behind and we can see their faces and hear their laugh and reach into something shapeless and touch them. So long as we tell stories, they can never really die." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"Grief can be an astonishingly beautiful response to loss and the pain of it can stir a renewed appreciation for life. It makes food taste better and feelings feel deeper and colors brighter. It amplifies love. Loss can imbue us with such profound gratitude for what we have, and I will always marvel that the void of death can be what makes us feel most alive." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb." — Najwa Zebian
"Words amidst tragedy rarely if ever touch the void of grief, let alone fill it. The need to speak is an attempt to bring something back...to undo something that can’t be undone. And platitudes aren’t all that comforting. Regardless, someone always says something like “At least they died doing what they loved.” The search for a silver lining, the stumbling to make sense of death, doesn’t make loss any less painful...Say what you can and mean what you say and when there are no more words just let the silence speak. For a moment, let the silence scream." — Cory Richards The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within
"Was I the person, the climber, that I believed I had been? Those events shaped who I was, and now they were receding into the distance." — Chris Jones Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968
"Grief is much like this: learning to hold joy and suffering, presence and absence, mourning and love, together, like the braided strands of a rope that still connects us as we move forward into an uncertain future." — Mailee Hung For the Love of Climbing, Episode 37, "The Arc"
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime." — Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
"The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends." — Sarah Jane Smith Doctor Who, "School Reunion"
"We are all existing on thin ice, not only in the mountains. Each loss evokes the often-invisible voids beneath our feet. Each threshold moment can seem to open a multitude of branching, alternative timelines, like the patterns of frost on a window, curling into infinite fractal forms, tracing phantom narratives of falls untaken, ice unbroken, illnesses uncaught, decisions unmade." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
