Leah Johnson

“I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“With humility may I reap my own power, and at the end of the journey, I hope I learn when to stand small so others can feel tall.”
― Sejal Badani, The Storyteller's Secret

“How would he know? He’s never been to a museum and seen art from Cézanne to Savage. Basquiat to Kahlo. He’s never eaten in a universal commissary with choices from udon to bucatini, Irish stew to pepián. Just because someone says something over and over doesn’t make it true. And suddenly, after all this time, I truly understand what the word dogma means.”
― Donna Barba Higuera, The Last Cuentista

“Books became our language. Books became our home. Books became our lives.”
― Donna Barba Higuera, The Last Cuentista