Anna Black

“It's almost like you have to pay less attention. At least to any one thing. Relaxed, but you're just--you're alert, too. You know that feeling when you're driving, and even if you're not looking in the rearview mirror, you know there's a car behind you? Because you're just keeping track of it? It's like that, but for everything around you. You need to know what's happening even when you're not looking. Like your mind is shallower. You can't think too much. You just feel.”
― Blair Braverman, Small Game

“Maybe there is dignity in accepting that we need nature because we need each other.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“So far the response around here has merely been to cry foul, either in the name of a materialistic secularism or in the name of a dogmatic political ideology, both perverted by excessive devotion to narrow self-interest and fear of the moral burdens of uncertainty. This is the reason why we need action guided by the best knowledge we can find but also by the highest principles of accountability to the gift of life. Science alone can't seem to make moral sense of our own nothingness, which is one reason why it is time to begin naming again, morally chastened by an appreciation of what our cartographic imagination has failed to understand.”
― George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

“One day Mara found a snakeskin in the grass. It was a whole skin, almost three feet long, and tied in a loose knot. As if the snake had curled through itself to shed. She thought about showing it off, but the snakeskin felt like hers alone, a secret, and she snuck it into one of the earth bags, nestled between one layer of dirt and the next. A talisman; her own contribution to the build.”
― Blair Braverman, Small Game