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
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
....he began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.
Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.
We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.
There is no one right way to live.
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.
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.
Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.
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.
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.
May the forests be with you and with your children.