Laci Durham

“Didn’t being out in the storm scare you?”
“Try a couple of high-summer prairie storms in a trailer,” she mused. “That either makes you terrified of them or indifferent to them.”
― Roberta Pearce, A Bird Without Wings

“To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But I have to warn you: Scrolling will never be enough. Reposting will never be enough. Hashtagging will never be enough. Because hatred has a way of convincing us that half love is whole. What I mean by that is we—all of us—have to fight against performance and lean into participation. We have to be participants. Active. We have to be more than audience members sitting comfortably in the stands of morality, shouting, “WRONG!” That’s too easy. Instead, we must be players on the field, on the court, in our classrooms and communities, trying to do right. Because it takes a whole hand—both hands—to grab hold of hatred. Not just a texting thumb and a scrolling index finger.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.”
― S.C. Gwynne