The Third Rainbow Girl Quotes

“I had a collection of ideas about West Virginia, but I had a hunch that they were all gross misinformation, plus none of them agreed: coal and the end of coal. Poverty and a mansion on a stripped mountain. Pickup trucks and VW buses. OxyContin and Jesus. Mother Jones and Don Blankenship. Knobby elbows and the fattest city in America.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“Take your right hand, and give the world the middle finger. Extend your thumb. If this is West Virginia,”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“The idea of Appalachia is well understood; the real place, less so. It is a borderland, not truly of the South or the North, and West Virginia is the only state entirely within its bounds. Because of its enormous natural resources and their subsequent extraction, which has largely profited corporations based elsewhere, the relationship between the people of West Virginia and the broader United States of America is often compared to that between a colonized people and their colonizers. The programs of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that funneled national dollars and aid workers to central Appalachia, though founded on humanitarian ideas, also furthered this troubled interdependency.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“I wanted to tell her that masculinity, as we have traditionally conceived of it, was a disease that was killing people. Mountain Views was an important part of treating it, but it was not enough. You cannot treat women only for a disease of which men are the main carriers.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“Many in Richmond and Washington, DC, looked down on western Virginia, regarding it as a lawless place where poor families occupied land they didn’t own and didn’t farm, a lifestyle that was at odds with both the Puritan ideals of family and Southern aristocratic values. Something “had to be done” about this place. The Virginia government adopted a policy that anyone squatting on land in the western territories of the state could claim first rights to buy it, but if they couldn’t come up with the cash fast, they would have to either start paying rent or move on. Most families in western Virginia made their livings from the natural world or bartered; they didn’t keep money on hand. Great swaths of land were sold to rich investors in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“I dismantled every system to make a new world, but then I had to live in it.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“White men accounted for nearly 80 percent of suicide deaths in 2017,”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“To be conceptualized or to conceptualize oneself as a victim, as my friend the writer Sarah Marshall often reminds me, is the thing more than any other that inhibits personal and moral growth.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“every woman is a nonconsensual researcher looking into the word “misogyny,”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“Before you can dispossess a people from their own land, you must first make them not people.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“I thought there was only ever a thing and its opposite, and nothing in between. In writing this book I have come to believe in this far less than I did when I started. Unraveling and unlearning this split logic is crucial to justice, I think, and it is crucial to love - loving a person, community, or most of all perhaps, a place, which may turn out to be the same thing. It is possible to be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. Most of us are. We are more than the worst story that has ever been told about us. But if we refuse to listen to it, that story can become a prophecy.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“When you don't know what you're doing, what your life is, it torments you.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“I knew the very position of dissenting and dismay was a privileged one and that my rejection of these choices made, to rational people and people with less class and race privilege, very little sense. Yet there is a particular cognitive dissonance that sets in when you have many of the advantages this life can bestow but have seen, up close and in slow motion, what they mean for those to whom they are denied. You start to think maybe you can abdicate your privilege like a crown, if only you try hard enough, and that maybe that will settle the score. I felt broken and running from the system in my mind in which the only choices were to dominate or be dominated, stay completely still or get annihilated by my feelings and the terror of history. It was a system of impossible twos and endless double binds, and I was afraid to move within it or choose anything. I felt that no one I knew had a clue about America, its true texture and shape and flavor, and that the ways I had been taught to live in it were no longer working.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“The Director gave me Denise Giardina, the great chronicler of the years when West Virginia’s miners fought back against exploitative mine owners, and local poets Louise McNeill and Irene McKinney. She gave me Nikki Giovanni, and bell hooks, and taught me about the rich Affrilachian community that had been thriving in the region for centuries. I read Chad Berry, who directs the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College in Kentucky, and learned about his idea of “the divided heart,”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia