Sharon > Sharon's Quotes

“Rich people didn't get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, Grass

“Terminal conscientiousness,” he replied, his brow furrowed. “Scrupulousness of the kind that creates conditions making poverty and illness inevitable, then congratulates itself over feeding the poor and caring for the sick.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, Grass

“Moles are tiny, they are cute, and like the rest of nature they do not care what we feel. They are devastating, and they always win.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“What we have read makes us what we are – quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.”
― Penelope Lively, Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

“The male frogs called, attracting mates to lay eggs and begin another generation. Their calls seemed to be protests, an act of defiance. Even as the walls of development squeezed the life out of Texas, that life called to its doomed future, reminding anyone who would listen that it was their home, too. I listened. With a heavy heart, I wondered how anyone could call such destruction progress.”
― Sara Dykman, Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration

“Knowledge is the only sword that can cut through harm being done in ignorance.”
― Sara Dykman, Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration

“You can’t argue with nature. It is the primary context for living and for everything alive.”
― Bernd Heinrich, Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death

“As I make clear throughout the book, OxyContin was hardly the only opioid to be fraudulently marketed or widely abused, and my choice to focus on Purdue is in no way a suggestion that other pharmaceutical companies do not deserve a great deal of blame for the crisis. The same could be said for the FDA, the doctors who wrote prescriptions, the wholesalers that distributed the opioids, and the pharmacies that filled the prescriptions. There’s plenty of blame to go around. I do share the view, however, of many doctors, public officials, prosecutors, and scholars that Purdue played a special role, as a pioneer. All”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

“As man diminishes,” he noted, “so the wildlife flourishes”
― Jonathan Meiburg, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey

“The thought that a bird could one day build its home in my head was reassuring, a reminder that the natural world will always be heedless of human time, human history, human interest.”
― Jonathan Meiburg, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey

“At that meal in the small kitchen, Diane hadn’t identified the girl’s race. And when Belle had asked, had the girl with Lawrence been Negro or white? her sister-in-law had blushed and said she couldn’t remember. Belle knew then, even if Diane didn’t suffer from a medical condition, she truly didn’t care what race somebody was. Instead of pleasing Belle, this discovery made her furious, and she walked to the stove, though the burners were off and had cooled. Belle stirred a pot of lukewarm greens to cover the noise of her loud breathing. Her outraged exhalations, as she considered that Diane was a white woman who could walk through the world and stay blessedly unaware of the color line.”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“called her one Saturday morning with a cooking question, and she was on her way to a protest in downtown Fresno. She has had breast cancer and heart problems. I was worried that it wasn’t safe for her to be in a crowd in a pandemic. She told me that racism was deadlier.”
― Diana Marcum, The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets, and Looking for Hope Along the Way

“The sprawling federal flood control infrastructure program of the mid-twentieth century had been replaced by an equally massive federal disaster relief and recovery assistance program of the late twentieth century.”
― Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers

“Migration cannot save a population if there is nowhere to go. If wiped out, there is no surviving group from which to replenish the lost creatures, and so they become locally, and eventually globally, extinct. Others may persist but must reduce the area over which they roam. In Alaska, of all the species that once roamed the mammoth steppe, only the caribou, brown bear and muskox, this last solely through reintroduction, have survived.[15]”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“There is no such thing as a fixed ideal for an environment, no reef onto which nostalgia can anchor. The human imposition of borders on the world inevitably changes our perception of what ‘belongs’ where, but to look into deep time is to see only an ever-changing list of inhabitants of one ecosystem or another. That is not to say that native species do not exist, only that the concept of native that we so easily tie to a sense of place also applies to time.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“What is important in conserving an ecosystem is conserving the functions, the connections between organisms that form a complete, interacting whole. In reality, species do move, and the notion of ‘native’ species is inevitably arbitrary, often tied into national identity. In Britain, ‘native’ plants and animals are categorized as those that have inhabited Britain since the last ice age. In the United States, however, ‘native’ plants and animals are those that have existed there only since before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. These plants and animals have legal protection over and above ‘aliens’, but there is no easy distinction between native and non-native ranges for species, and non-native plants are not necessarily damaging to native diversity”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“What is native to an area and what is not is a function of the scale at which you choose to look, and tying long-extinct species or ecological concepts to present-day artifices like borders and flags is a game in which one must tread carefully.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Constancy”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“In the complex game that is an ecosystem, every player is connected to some, but not all, others, a web not just of food but of competition, of who lives where, of light and shade, and of internal disputes within species. Extinction bursts through that web, breaking connections and threatening its integrity. Sever one strand, and it wavers, reshapes, but survives. Tear another, and it will still hold. Over long periods, repairs are made as species adapt, and new balances are reached, new associations made. If enough strands are broken at once, the web will collapse, drifting in the breeze, and the world will have to make do with what little remains. So, after a mass extinction event, a turnover happens, with new species appearing, the web self-repairing. Where”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: Journeys in Earth's Extinct Ecosystems

“Some say that we are not but islands ourselves, chance masses of cells each smaller than a grain of sand, bodies formed and unformed by wind and sea and earth. I say that may be so, but no island is truly an island. It is part of a chain, a submerged range. Such are men, not alone, but each bearing the sands of his ancestors, and all of us pulled together, together, by what but love?”
― Taylor Brown, Wingwalkers

“the attempt to keep up appearances as the All-American Southern White Christian Middle-Class family. It felt as if families like mine just passed down this lie over the generations. I was a part of this farce, and it bothered me. We often think of whiteness as the complexion of our skin, but whiteness is a fantasy that tries to minimize our failings and maximize our power. I knew from spending time with my friends’ families that this fabrication played out differently inside every white home, but that night at my house, the worst night we’d ever weathered, I felt as if I saw through the face of whiteness and glimpsed the hollowness inside.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“Whiteness is a conspiracy of both silence and violence.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“I knew the appeal of having a group of whites to see as worse than yourself. We could look down on them for being racist at the same time they kept us from seeing our own racism.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“I realized this was the logic of whiteness. Always deflect and defer and change the subject when your innocence is questioned, your power noted. Whiteness is like a chameleon, camouflaging its own power in order to maintain its simultaneous sense of innocence.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“The majority of white people saw it and loved it, bringing this racist strongman to the White House. In doing so, they were endorsing a view of the world that I knew. It was the unreconstructed southern white view of history, a view where to be white meant to be both indignantly privileged and also angry and aggrieved, always demanding more. I was pissed off and disgusted with Mom and Dad and with all of the generations of our family who had never addressed slavery or Jim Crow. We’d invented the goddamn “alternative facts” with our myths about plantations, slavery, and the Civil War. It was an awful time to be white, but it was an even worse time to be Black or Mexican or Muslim or anyone else who suffered because of our whiteness.”
― Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness

“Carson admitted that she wasn’t interested in treating the subject with any sort of journalistic fairness. When she shared this thinking with Shawn, he encouraged it. “After all,” he said, “there are some things one doesn’t have to be objective and unbiased about.” Chapter”
― Elena Conis, How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT

“Again—this latency of life. It drifts around us all the time, invisible, like an ether. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink. Savor it: each breath, each sip, is thick with potential. In this cup of nothing is the germ of everything.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“The neuroscientist David Eagleman once proposed that we have three deaths: the first at the point at which the body ceases to function, the second upon burial, and the third being “that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“For more than a hundred and fifty years, Peru and Ecuador were locked in a bitter territorial dispute over the Cordillera del Cóndor, an offshoot of the Andes rising between the two countries, leaving large areas undeveloped as a result: pristine forests unlogged and rich gold and copper seams unmined. Environmental surveys in the 1990s revealed the region to be one of the most biologically diverse (and least-studied) habitats in the world; almost every visit to its slopes reveals yet more species unknown to science. This environmental storehouse became a key plank of talks—something of significance that the two countries now shared—and, as part of the 1998 peace agreement, both sides committed to creating extensive reserves on both sides of the border. Transnational reserves of this sort are known as “peace parks”—powerful demonstrations of the healing power of nature, in more ways than one. One”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

“Human industry has changed, and is continuing to change the world. Even if we were all to be wiped out tomorrow—factories falling silent; generators shuddering to a halt; cargo ships drifting and colliding, sinking to the seabed, sending sediments billowing—we have set in motion evolutionary forces that will continue to act upon the genetic makeup of almost every other species alive on this Earth. They shape-shift and metamorphose, transmute and adapt, in ways that we cannot anticipate and certainly cannot control. They want to live, if they can.”
― Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape