Ashley McMullen

“Dene wants to tell him he'd looked up the [Gertrude Stein] quote in its original context, in her Everybody's Autobiography, and found that she was talking about the place where she'd grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it's what happened to Native people, he wants to explain that they're not the same, that Dene is Native, born and raised in Oakland, from Oakland. ... The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it's been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death... is the true measure of the Divine within us. ... I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.”
― Alan Brennert, Moloka'i

“there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Environmental justice cannot be separated from social justice. The two are deeply intertwined.”
― Laura Coleman