Breaking Clean Quotes

“I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

“Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

“When women's lib hit the headlines many of these second-generation ranch women sniffed around its edges and pitched it back like a dead carp. If equality meant doing a man's work, you could have it. That brand of equality had dug their mothers an early grave and was three feet down on their own. They'd come a long way baby, and were on the road back to being real ladies -- or so it appeared.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

“...like my mother, like the ranchwomen who peopled my childhood, I would not spout ideology or argue theory. Strong women roared in silence. We roared by doing.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

“And that long year, as I turned my back on the adult world I found myself face-to-face with the innocence still visible in my little sister. My attacks on her had grown more sophisticated over the years, a verbal sniping almost as savage and satisfying as fist-fighting. She had no reason to trust me. Yet when I turned to her for companionship, she swung in beside me without hesitation, following my lead with a loyalty so unswerving and undeserved it was frightening. I needed her story, this child of fierce emotion and blind courage, for I could not find my own.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

“Every generation relearns the rules its fathers have forgotten. One rule is awareness, the need to see past the power of human hands on the land, to the power beneath it. Those who forget have the wind to jog their memory, wind slipping evenly through the sage, dusting across the fields. Watch your back, it's whispering. This land owes you nothing.”
― Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean