Stephen Pax Leonard > Quotes

“With stiffened air, the streams are iced over. Walking on the thin, brittle ice is akin to treading on glass, cracking as one skates across it like a spoon skirting the circumference of the hard caramel of a crème brûlée.”
― Stephen Pax Leonard, The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging

“I continue to cleave a path through the rocky wilderness, climbing over small mountains of scree, dumped there by something greater than man.”
― Stephen Pax Leonard, The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging

“Masautsiaq is extremely cheerful and it takes just a few words of mispronounced Inuktun to light up his face. Masautsiaq is very much amused that I have been greeting him with the words, hainang hunai: a slightly old fashioned salutation used perhaps when spotting somebody from a distance who one has not seen for quite sometime. He finds this very amusing and insists on repeating it several times when he sees me. The result is reciprocal room-filling laughter.”
― Stephen Pax Leonard, The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging

“The beach becomes pebbly, and the pebbles become boulders. Haunting rock formations resembling statues called inuihet ('the stones that look like people') rise vertically to my left, grimacing and scolding.”
― Stephen Pax Leonard, The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging