Julie

“The idea of the frontier runs so deep in American culture that we internalize the idea that to find nature—real nature—you have to get in your car and drive out of town.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“He was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer, and had a talent for whimsical humor that distracted them from the gaps he left.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Railroad rights-of-way are weird zones that you can find almost anywhere in the American Landscape. Our urban spaces have worked to overwrite them in favor of motor vehicles in the era since World War II; often you can see the traces of tracks from old streetcar lines or intercity routes peeking through the asphalt of a public street. Sometimes the remains persist as actual ruins.”
― Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time