Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinnis an American writer, cultural critic, and former publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticizes this term, claiming that it portrays the environment as somehow separate from human life and thus creates a false dichotomy. Quinn specifically identifies his philosophy as new tribalism...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 October 1935
CityOmaha, NE
lying hands squirrels
All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
fall eagles hands
Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They're tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations.
zoos expression hands
[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
hands gorillas ishmael
five severed fingers do not make a hand
cant close fire living mental nature neighbors people seeing sunset tend watch wonderful
Its the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. Its seeing all those sunsets that does it. You cant watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbors tepee. Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health.
people facts world
The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.
religious people way
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
community earth care
Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
stories looks knows
No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.
mean issues world
Animism is not a belief system, but a worldview: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It’s a statement about what you mean by ‘sacred,’ just as ‘Money can’t buy happiness’ is a statement about what you mean by ‘happiness.’ To put it all very simply, animism isn’t a belief system, it’s a value system.
humanity world captives
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.
children may forests
May the forests be with you and with your children.
successful here-and-there hunters
The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally.
world made damn
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.