The Quickening Quotes

“For hours I stand in my cold-weather gear, watching the pack open and close around the ship. I am transfixed by the ice’s labored music: the clicking and popping as pressure ridges heap up, the sibilant cascade of water draining from an overturned floe, how beneath it all I swear it sounds as though a whale were singing. Yet I have no idea how any of this—the thick rind of sea ice, the single-celled organisms lounging on its underside, the krill and seals who sup there—came into being. When I sit beneath the red spruce in my backyard, I know that it began with a pinecone, suffuse with seeds that the chickadees eat. I know something about the seasonal wobble that coaxes the seed from its protective case when the weather is right, for I have lived with spruce trees all of my life. But here I have no referent. No way of teasing apart, intuitively, the process that gave birth to this surreal Seussian landscape.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“There are so many ways in which my journey toward Thwaites taught me how to mother—or, at least, how to invest a whole lot of time and energy into a project without having any idea how things will turn out.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“I can celebrate the idea that to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of the change yourself.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“Should I have a child, their greenhouse gas emissions will cause roughly fifty square meters of sea ice to melt every year that they are alive.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“What if, by having a child, I destroy the possibility of ever truly being alone?”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“it’s very hard to accept the challenge of contributing to the world with one more person and being responsible for helping this person become someone good.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“It occurred to me... I ought to treat Antarctica not as a desolate outpost at the end of the earth but as a place where life begins.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“Antarctica’s great glaciers are responding to us, to our actions thousands of miles away, by birthing bergs whose very bodies bear grave warnings seems all wrong. Because, I wonder, how bad must things get for a parent to make such a sacrifice?”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

“I can distance myself from the disease. There’s money in the savings account and food in the pantry,” I say, embarrassed. “So many people are so much more vulnerable.” It is the same story I see playing out all across our climate-changed country, but at warp speed. Those who can afford to limit their exposure—by working from home or building a floodwall, for example—do. And those who cannot, suffer. This safety, for me and my unborn child, is the definition of privilege in the twenty-first century, though never before have I reaped its benefits in such a sudden, obvious way.”
― Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth