April

“The persistence and brutality of American poverty can be disheartening, leaving us cynical about solutions.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“A friend of hers had finished processing his wild rice, or manoomin, and the bag was for us. The rice was nicely cleaned, a rich green-brown. I plunged my unbandaged hand into the bag. The feeling of the rice, the cool laky scent, was calming. We took some out and admired the length of the grains. Native people around here have a specific ferocity about wild rice. I’ve seen faces harden when tame paddy rice, the uniformly brown commercially grown rice, is mentioned, called wild rice, or served under false pretenses. People get into fights over it. Real wild rice is grown wild, harvested by Native people, and tastes of the lake it comes from. This was the good stuff.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

“Growing up in a shack in the ghetto meant learning how to endure such an environment while also learning that some people never had to. People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves.5”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City