Dustin

“How did I ever learn that people like my daughter were less-than? Had the roots of my thinking been planted by the defect language, by the bad seed and at zero language? Had they begun in the hallways of that elementary school I attended? Not quite. The roots of my thinking were older than me. They were older than the neglected buildings that housed people with intellectual disabilities, older than the American laws requiring their sterilization. The roots dug deep into history’s soil, reaching even past the story of Jesus’s disciples, who found a blind man on the side of a road and asked their master, “Who sinned to make this man blind? The man or his parents?” Disability as punishment . Disability as sin. Disability as problem, as outcast, as other. These equations have been graffitied all over human history.”
― Heather Lanier, Raising a Rare Girl: A Memoir

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“...in my daughter’s first year, I was learning: the simple act of loving her was countercultural.”
― Heather Lanier, Raising a Rare Girl: A Memoir

“To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Barry López