Mara Washburn

“When she is done she looks at herself in the mirror. Maybe she does not hate what she sees. Maybe she does not blame the image reflected back at her for everything bad that has happened.”
― Amy Reed, The Nowhere Girls

“Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming—it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“The idea of Appalachia is well understood; the real place, less so. It is a borderland, not truly of the South or the North, and West Virginia is the only state entirely within its bounds. Because of its enormous natural resources and their subsequent extraction, which has largely profited corporations based elsewhere, the relationship between the people of West Virginia and the broader United States of America is often compared to that between a colonized people and their colonizers. The programs of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that funneled national dollars and aid workers to central Appalachia, though founded on humanitarian ideas, also furthered this troubled interdependency.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“Knowledge, I’ve found, will not betray you the way that people will.”
― Axton Betz-Hamilton, The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity