Cassie Chambers > Quotes

“I had the fire and the strength of the mountains in my bones.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“This holler feels like home, and this house feels like family. There are women’s stories here, stories of resilience, love, and strength. This community knows them well, but their echo hasn’t reached far enough into the outside world. Instead, these tales have ricocheted within the mountains, growing more faint with time. I want to tell these stories because they matter, because I’m afraid that they will be forgotten, because they have the power to make this community visible. As I stop my vehicle and walk toward the house, the memories wash over me like the sunlight on the mountain hills.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“For a while, in that room, my past and present were together and getting along just fine.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“But outsiders who rush into the hills don’t always take the time to see that mountain people are a creative, resourceful lot. They don’t understand that Appalachians can be—should be—partners in the effort to make their lives better. They don’t grasp that, if given the right resources and opportunities, these communities are capable of saving themselves. If there’s one thing that women in these hills know how to do, it’s get things done.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“Experts on education say that exposing low-income children to higher-income environments is one of the most effective tools for motivating them to strive to do well in school.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“For me, there is hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systemically marginalized. In men and women who take care of each other even when the outside world does not take care of them. In people who broke their bodies in tobacco fields and coal mines to make a living in the only community they have ever known. We don’t take time to see it: the hope in the poverty, the spark against the dreary backdrop, the grit in the mountain women.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“NO TOBACCO USE ALLOWED IN COURTHOUSE. EXCEPT FOR THE OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF, COUNTY TREASURER, AND COUNTY CLERK. I used to think it was a joke, but a lawyer who works there assured me that it’s not.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“We caught box turtles along the road and built pens for them in the backyard. The turtles dug out, and we would search the neighborhood for signs of the tall flowers we had taped to their backs.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“For me, there is hope in the spirit of a people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been systemically marginalized.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

“It’s hard for me to know which part of Owsley County I should show the rest of the world. Presenting the broken, falling-in places helps people understand the extent of the poverty. And I do want them to know how deep it goes. Maybe if they understand it, they can help fix it. But I also don’t want them to think that this poverty is all that exists in Appalachia—to see Eastern Kentucky as hopeless, broken, dirty. That’s not what I see when I look at this place that I love.”
― Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains