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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Fire, Ice Water, Air

  Jay Griffiths (2007). “Wild: An Elemental Journey”, p.168, Penguin UK

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Animal, Blood, Skins

  Jay Griffiths (2015). “Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness”, p.53, Counterpoint

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Children, Silence, Unhappy

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Loss, Silence, Mind

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Hate, Light, Shining

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Empathy, Humanity, Singing

  " Songs and freedom in West Papua" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2011.

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Messengers, Duty

  "Call of the wild" by Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2007.

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Medicine, Tree, Mind

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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

  Jay Griffiths

  Loss, People, Culture

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Children, Thinking, Space

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Ocean, Blue, Whales

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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• Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

  Jay Griffiths

  Opposites, Measurement, Facts

  "The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Voting, Democracy, Vote

  "Don't give climate change heretics an easy ride" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. August 31, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Buddhist, Believe, World

  "Songs and freedom in West Papua" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2011.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Cat, Animal, Squirrels

  "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Schedules, Measurement, Emotion

  "The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Holiday, White, People

  "Call of the wild" by Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2007.

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• Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

  Jay Griffiths

  People, Excess, Spirit

  "Call of the wild" by Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2007.

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• A functional media is as important to democratic freedom as voting.

  Jay Griffiths

  Media, Voting, Important

  "Indonesia's 'slow motion genocide'" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. December 30, 2010.

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• Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.

  Jay Griffiths

  Media, Ideas, Climate

  "Don't give climate change heretics an easy ride" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. August 31, 2012.

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• A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own

  Jay Griffiths

  Wild Creatures, Creatures, Subjects

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• Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

  Jay Griffiths

  Heretic

  "Don't give climate change heretics an easy ride" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. August 31, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Space, Example, Needs

  " The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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• I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense-mongers, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate.

  Jay Griffiths

  Two, Issues, Climate

  "Don't give climate change heretics an easy ride" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. August 31, 2012.

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• 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.

  Jay Griffiths

  Grace, Timing, Individual

  "The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

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