Inuit QUOTES

1 " Cal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal and sets them down on a drafting table.
'Let's draw.'
I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of 64 Crayola crayons, unabashedly showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don't do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words, but when I see Cal's pad and charcoal, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that it's not the same. I use my words, my artist's charcoal to describe what I'm thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb or brush the paper with the back of his hands. He listens and nods and doesn't interrupt. And when I'm done speaking he looks at the drawing, and his eyes get really big. Slowly, he turns his pad around for me to see. My heart stops and then starts.
'Yes,' I say.
It's perfect. Alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn't have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There's a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come. I am alive. "

― Steven Rowley , Lily and the Octopus

2 " In northwest Alaska, kunlangeta " might be applied to a man who, for example, repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and does not go hunting, and, when the other men are out of the village, takes sexual advantage of many women." The Inuits tacitly assume that kunlangeta is irremediable. And so, according to Murphy, the traditional Inuit approach to such a man was to insist he go hunting, and then, in the absence of witnesses, push him off the edge of the ice. "

3 " It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment.

I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. "

― , Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings

4 " Martie was large, at least by Inuit standards, with skin the colour of an heirloom suitcase and a voice like a cartoon train wreck. "

― McGrath M. J.

5 " The Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow. "

― Greg Mortenson , Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

6 " Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! "

― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

7 " Stories have a unique power, David. The Inuit believe they can capture souls. "

8 " The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors. "

― Johnjoe McFadden , Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

9 " In the Arctic, the Inuit are saying water and land are the same; they're an unbroken unity. In the winter, you travel on the ice because it's the linkage and the easiest way, and in the summer, you move around on the water. "