Carla Jean > Carla Jean's Quotes

“Losing a sibling, especially in youth, is a particular blow, a lateral loss of shared history and DNA that lacerates your identity. Your old narrative is shattered. Your new narrative becomes shapeless, full of confusion and pain. Double that.”
― Ann Gisleson

“And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally, wounded at our hands.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“How will we sing when Miami goes underwater, when the raft of garbage in the ocean gets as big as Texas, when the only remaining polar bear draws his last breath, when fracking, when Keystone, when Pruitt? I don’t know. And I imagine, sometimes, often, we will get it wrong. But I’m not celebrating the earth because I am an optimist—though I am an optimist. I am celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration. I am celebrating because how in the face of this earth could I not?”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“Another lesson from my childhood: once the thing I fear most happens, there’s no place to go but up. Being cut out of my father’s Cadillac with a chain saw by highway patrollers on Christmas Eve, for instance, was so much better than sitting in the bar with him while he had his fourth martini knowing black ice was forming on the road outside. Being in the safety of the hospital while they applied my three-quarter body cast will all of the nurses making a big fuss over my four-year-old self was so much better than knowing my father was about to pick me up and throw me across the room.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown up meant.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us—it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.”
― Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country