The Absent Hand Quotes

“am reluctant to characterize Americans as special in any regard, because that has gotten us into so much trouble. Yet we may”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“we have not yet figured out how to govern ourselves effectively enough to become good custodians of nature. That is perhaps the darkest feature of this despair, and yet there is also hope in it: the answer lies within ourselves. It’s natural to want to protect ourselves, so it doesn’t seem foolish to hope that we will. But our relationship to nature is not the only instance in which we are unable to respond in a self-protective way to a self-made situation that reflects our brilliance, and even power, but could also doom us, reflecting our helplessness before ourselves in the same fateful way. The coordinates of our nature problem are almost exactly the same as those created by the Cold War, while molecular biology may well present us with a similar paradox of triumphant achievement and boundless disaster in the future. Who among us”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“become common. The form of our times is regional, rather than city-centered. The landscape pattern created by work in our time is, interestingly, more like the old agrarian one: it has many centers like a painting by Kandinsky. “Region” is indeed an old word, going back to “kingdom,” a time when boundaries were a bit vague, as defined by culture more than law, and, in many cases, topography, especially mountains”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“a federal government given land-use powers would be manipulated by the mercantile barons to their own ends, to the detriment of the common people.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“All was perfectly scaled to the human body and, in that, conducive to a sense of safety, of being at home in a known world.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“life on Earth now. I don’t always feel like being a beginner in a foreign language, continuously and mercilessly exposed to that special terror and despair, the deep inadequacy, that the unfamiliar syntax can engender.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape

“We live as in a walled garden now, walled by ourselves. We have been building this wall for some time, but now it’s complete. That is new. And yet our surroundings remain as radiantly mysterious as ever.”
― Suzannah Lessard, The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape