Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“A willingness to lose one's self in a story was the first step to learning compassion, to appreciating other cultures, to realizing what possibilities the world held for people who kept at life despite the odds.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“Sleep is just a good idea. I bow to the god caffeine.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“It’s my belief that animals can help a human being travel to the wounds of childhood. The best part is, once you go there, you can fix things. Get on with life.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“Mothers are only human, you turn it over to God and then you just wing it.”
― Jo Ann Mapson

“She knew for a fact that being left-handed automatically made you special.
Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Albert Schweitzer were all left-handed. Of course, no believable scientific theory could rest on such a small group of people. When Lindsay probed further, however, more proof emerged. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carrol, H.G. Wells, Eudora Welty, and Jessamyn West- all lefties. The lack of women in her research had initially bothered her until she mentioned it to Allegra. "Chalk that up to male chauvinism," she said. "Lots of left-handed women were geniuses. Janis Joplin was. All it means is that the macho-man researchers didn't bother asking.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, The Owl & Moon Cafe

“Juniper laughed for real, but one of those fake smiles he considered a plague of the Caucasian race followed. If you’re sad, be sad, he wanted to say.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“Glory sipped her second glass of red wine, impatient for the slight buzz that made her edges blur.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Solomon's Oak

“Oh, Mama,” I said. “What if I don’t live that long?” My mother didn’t hesitate one second. “By hook or by crook, you will. Having children only increases your grip on the world. It’s like reading a thriller. You can’t put it down because you have to know how the story turns out.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Along Came Mary

“What ever was fair? What ever is? You put one foot in front of the other and you walk through all of it. And if you’re lucky, like I am, on either side, you plant flowers.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Bad Girl Creek

“Women hoped harder than men, he thought, sometimes hard enough to change the outcome of things.”
― Jo-Ann Mapson, Goodbye, Earl: A Bad Girl Creek Novel

“I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Of what use to humanity, I ask myself, is a man who cannot see beyond his own hurt?”
― Janisse Ray

“The assumption is that hope is a prerequisite for action. Without hope one becomes depressed and then unable to act.
I want to stress that I do not act because I have hope. I act whether I have hope or not. It is useless to rely on hope as motivation to do what's necessary and just and right. Why doesn't anybody ever talk about love as motivation to act?
I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.
We are going to have to fall in love with place again and learn to stay put.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“I drink old-growth forest in like water. This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history -- my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring. Here mortality's roving hands grapple with air. I can see my place as human in a natural order more grand, whole, and functional than I’ve ever witnessed, and I am humbled, not frightened, by it. Comforted. It is as if a roundtable springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I no longer have to worry about what happens to souls.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature--the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.
I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.

Our seeds are disappearing.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Something happens to me when I garden. I am fully, reliably, blissfully present to who I am and where I am in that moment. I am an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“The moral of the story, Son," Pun would say, "is Don't take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels."
Of all lessons, that one I never learned and I hope I never do. My heart daily grows new foliage, always adding people, picking up new heartaches like a wool coat collects cockleburs and beggar's-lice seeds. It gets fuller and fuller as I walk slow as a sloth, carrying all the pain Pun and Frank and so many others tried to walk from. Especially the pain of the lost forest. Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart. We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“I knew that Amy couldn’t have died from a drug overdose, as she had been drug-free since 2008. But although she had been so brave and had fought so hard in her recovery from alcoholism, I knew she must have lapsed once again. I thought that Amy hadn’t had a drink for three weeks. But she had actually started drinking at Dionne’s Roundhouse gig the previous Wednesday. I didn’t know that at the time. The following morning Janis, Jane, Richard Collins (Janis’s fiancé), Raye, Reg and I went to St Pancras mortuary to officially identify Amy. Alex couldn’t bring himself to go, which I fully understood. When we arrived there were loads of paps outside the court, but they were all very respectful. We were shown into a room and saw Amy behind a window. She looked very, very peaceful, as if she was just asleep, which in a way made it a lot harder. She looked lovely. There was a slight red blotchiness to her skin, which was why, at the time, I thought she might have had a seizure: she looked as she had done when she had had seizures in the past. Eventually the others left Janis and me to say goodbye to Amy by ourselves. We were with her for about fifteen minutes. We put our hands on the glass partition and spoke to her. We told her that Mummy and Daddy were with her and that we would always love her. I can’t express what it was like. It was the worst feeling in the world.”
― Mitch Winehouse

“Something happens to you in an old-growth forest. At first you are curious to see the tremendous girth and height of the trees, and you sally forth, eager. You start to saunter, then amble, slower and slower, first like a fox and then an armadillo and then a tortoise, until you are trudging at the pace of an earthworm, and then even slower, the pace of a sassafras leaf's turning. The blood begins to languish in your veins, until you think it has turned to sap. You hanker to touch the trees and embrace them and lean your face against their bark, and you do. You smell them. You look up at leaves so high their shapes are beyond focus, into far branches with circumferences as thick as most trees.
Every limb of your body becomes weighted, and you have to prop yourself up. There's this strange current of energy running skyward, like a thousand tiny bells tied to your capillaries, ringing with your heartbeat. You sit and lean against one trunk-it's like leaning against a house or a mountain. The trunk is your spine, the nerve centers reaching into other worlds, below ground and above. You stand and press your body into the ancestral and enduring, arms wide, and your fingers do not touch. You wonder how big the unseen gap.
If you stay in one place too long, you know you'll root.”
― Janisse Ray

“I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets. There's nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pines. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow. No mountains, no canyons, no rocky streams, no waterfalls. The rivers are muddy, wide and flat, like somebody’s feet. The coastal plain lacks the stark grace of the desert or the umber panache of the pampas”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I’ll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, as reported in the Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“She was so strong a ship could have been hewn from her body.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Most of us, most of our lives, are asked to live small. Most of us quit trying very young to live the bigness we know is possible.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Perhaps no word exists in our terribly inadequate English language to name this abstract, emotional thing that is not forgiveness, is not forgetting, and also is both.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Some things ought to exist outside capitalism, and wildness should be one of them.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“In the wild world, relationship is evolutionary, time is geologic, beauty is intelligent. There we find ourselves under a powerful spell.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans