Marsha

“was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets the house. It brings piles of snow and bonecracking cold. From November to March you walk leaning forward at a twenty-degree angle, even indoors, and spend your life waiting for your car to warm up, or digging it out of drifts or scraping futilely at ice that seems to have been applied to the windows with superglue. And then one day spring comes. The snow melts, you stride about in shirtsleeves, you incline your face to the sun. And then, just like that, spring is over and it’s summer. It is as if God has pulled a lever in the great celestial powerhouse. Now the weather rolls in from the opposite direction, from the tropics far to the south, and it hits you like a wall of heat. For six months, the heat pours over you. You sweat oil. Your pores gape. The grass goes brown. Dogs look as if they could die. When you walk downtown you can feel the heat of the pavement rising through the soles of your shoes. Just when you think you might very well go crazy, fall comes and for two or three weeks the air is mild and nature is friendly. And then it’s winter and the cycle starts again. And you think, “As soon as I’m big enough, I’m going to move far, far away from here.”
― Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

“I have to say I am relieved it is over: At the end I could feel only pity For that urge toward more life. . . . Goodbye.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Finally the fear came. From a place deeper than the sea. Fear from knowing she would be alone again. Probably always. A life sentence.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing