Pnw Quotes

“But mostly, finally, ultimately, I'm here for the weather.

As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tent to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk - although, depending on the bite in the wind, they're times when it's more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there's a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather.

In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.”
― Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backward

“To know Seattle one must know its waterfront. It is a good waterfront, not as busy as New York's, not as self-consciously colorful as San Francisco's, not as exotic as New Orleans, but a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stores--a waterfront where you can hear foreign languages and buy shrunken heads and genuine stuffed mermaids, where you can watch the seamen follow the streetwalkers and the shore patrol follow the sailors, where you can stand at an open-air bar and drink clam nectar, or sit on a deadhead and watch the water, or go to an aquarium and look at an octopus.”
― Murray Morgan, Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

“It was very damp and misty–which some people from outside the Pacific Northwest consider to be rain, but I do not. This is typical weather for the Pacific Northwest and Olympia. It is often wet in Olympia, but we have an average of only 49.95 inches a year of actual precipitation. That’s less than in Denver. In Olympia, the air is damp, and water collects and drips from everywhere. We do not get big downpours, but we get damp and spongy.

I don’t care. It helps the trees grow, and I climb the trees.”
― Ned Hayes, The Eagle Tree

“You could wait your whole life for sense to take shape. Does it matter from here, whether those are seals or bull kelp? Keep looking.”
― Elizabeth Austen, Every Dress a Decision

“You can be your own, unknow self-- not a psalm, but a segue. It's time.”
― Elizabeth Austen, Every Dress a Decision

“A coastal forest can be an awesome place to behold: huge, holy, and eternal feeling [...], once inside, there is no future and no past, only the sodden, twilit now.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed