Andrea McDowell

“The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishes with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that the roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, "temporal." They don't only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being. That infinite plethora of triggers makes complex PTSD more difficult to heal from than traditional PTSD. And the way the books seem to think about it, our fixed state of being also makes us more problematic.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is