Summer Brennan > Quotes

“But I find that perhaps the greatest gift of reading is how it can transport us not to the future or to the past, but to the present. How it helps us be right here; to return to ourselves. It gives us different lenses to try viewing the world through, to see if any of them can help the universe make more sense. We may write to shout into the abyss of history, but we read to hear the voices of our fellows calling back to us through the dark.”
― Summer Brennan

“To escape the throngs, we decided to see the new Neil Degrasse Tyson planetarium show, Dark Universe. It costs more than two movie tickets and is less than thirty minutes long, but still I want to go back and see it again, preferably as soon as possible. It was more visually stunning than any Hollywood special effect I’d ever seen, making our smallness as individuals both staggering and - strangely - rather comforting. Only five percent of the universe consists of ordinary matter, Neil tells us. That includes all matter - you, and me, and the body of Michael Brown, and Mork’s rainbow suspenders, and the letters I wrote all summer, and the air conditioner I put out on the curb on Christmas Day because I was tired of looking at it and being reminded of the person who had installed it, and my sad dying computer that sounds like a swarm of bees when it gets too hot, and the fields of Point Reyes, and this year’s blossoms which are dust now, and the drafts of my book, and Israeli tanks, and the untaxed cigarettes that Eric Garner sold, and my father’s ill-fitting leg brace that did not accomplish what he’d hoped for in terms of restoring mobility, and the Denver airport, and haunting sperm whales that sleep vertically, and the water they sleep in, and Mars and Jupiter and all of the stars we see and all of the ones we don’t. That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there - all of it, with just this one sliver of knowable, livable, finite light and life. And did I mention the effects were really cool? After seeing something like that it’s hard to stay mad at anyone, even yourself.”
― Summer Brennan

“Still, she knew they were there, even if she couldn’t see them; like benevolent ghosts lost in the ether, not far from her, rolling their plump bodies in the surf or stretched languorously on the shore.”
― Summer Brennan, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America

“Our shoes pin us to the world, like Peter Pan to his shadow. More than simply facilitating our movement out-of-doors, they mediate between the wearer and the ground. Perhaps it is less the world they pin us to, but our place in it; that shadow of society that follows wherever we go.”
― Summer Brennan, High Heel

“We take a wander along a chilly beach and return to civilization a little more wild-eyed and bedraggled, hands numb, hair wayward, skin sticky with salt. It is good to be thus disheveled, to feel the blood pound through limbs made tame by commutes and television; to let the elements lean on us a little.”
― Summer Brennan, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America

“A pair of worn shoes is a portrait of its wearer. Not just the scuffed toes and heels ground down by months or years of pavement, or the narratives told by damage and repair, but the form and function of them, their type. They are a part of our costume in both the quotidian and theatrical sense. And because the stories that shoes tell are invariably about public life, they must also be about status, and power, or the lack of it.”
― Summer Brennan, High Heel

“This is what is all too often missing from the familiar wilderness scriptures of Muir and Thoreau: that the land was not empty when they found it. The first peoples of North America had already been laid waste by diseases before the settlers with their covered wagons ever started to move west.”
― Summer Brennan, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America