Andrea McDowell

“A world built on speed, productivity, more, more, more! and far too few bathrooms (and bathroom breaks) does not consider or care for the actual bodies we live in. In other words, ableism affects all of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or not.”
― Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

“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

“During a chance meeting, the naturalist E.O. Wilson advised me to give up thinking we are doomed. "It's our chance to practice altruism," he said. I looked doubtful, but he continued. "We have to wear suits of armor like World War II soldiers and just keep going. We have to get used to the changes in the landscape and step over the dead bodies. We have to discipline our behavior and not get stuck in tribal and religious restrictions. We have to work altruistically and cooperatively and make a new world.”
― 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