Katharine Haake

“In general, we imagine rivers to be subject to a kind of dynamic equilibrium, largely stable geologic features, with processes like regional incision or subtle shifts in mountain building causing short- and medium-term variation around some slowly changing mean condition, but in fact it is far more common to see dramatic change over short periods, with long periods of stability between in what geologists refer to as 'dynamic metastable equilibrium.'It is the same with families, memory, the history of a person's life, what we believe to be true.”

“There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.”

“Even as I learned to name the plants -- dogwood, five-fingered fern, mugwort -- I was stunned by the failure of language to reflect what I saw or felt.”

“Story is revealed not in telling, but in listening.”

“Numbers arrange themselves the way numbers will, just as a word will, a story.”

“Poets dream of being archaeologists, as if their lives were sedimentary, like rocks. Poets don't mind getting down and dirty with the past.”

“When a basket is woven, each strand of grass, or reed, or wool, or root, must pass repeatedly through human hands, and this, the principle of human touch, is what remains long after the artifact has lost utility or form, something, I think, about life being lived in its physical moment, something, it must be, about grace.”

“Maybe story is just for the assembling of things -- history, imagination, fact -- without which . . . our lives will dissipate, losing meaning and coherence.”

“Desire is story itself.”