“This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again--your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It's all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“i never knew how much we consumed. it seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. it's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. it's no wonder the economy collapsed, if eva and i use so much merely to stay alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“It’s a physical urge, stronger than thirst or sex. Halfway back on the left side of my head there is a spot that longs for the jolt of a bullet, that yearns for that fire, that final empty rip. I want to be let out of this cavern, to open myself up to the ease of not-living. I am tired of sorrow and struggle and worry. I am tired of my sad sister. I want to turn out the last light.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Still, there's a lucidity that sometimes comes in that moment when you find yourself looking at the world through your tears, as if those tears served as a lens to clarify what it is you're looking at.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“So my sister dances and the dead house burns, and I scrawl these few last words by the light of its burning. I know I should toss this story, too, on those flames. But I am still too much a storyteller -or at least a storykeeper-still too much my father's daughter to burn these pages.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of DC. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the US had been forgotten.
Although the Fundamentalists' predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the last of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive At the same time we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It’s no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It’s no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Instinct is older than paper, wilder than words.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of the Civil War.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I get so scared, I can’t stop it. It’s like black waves, and I’m a little cork. I bob to the surface and think I’ll do okay, and then another wave comes and I’m drowning again.” I”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it's true that the people who live through the times that become history's pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of th Civil War.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Despite her way with fire, Eva always makes me think of water. She's slender and sparkling as the stream beyond our clearing, and like that stream she seems content to live a part of her life underground, seems sure - even now - that she is headed somewhere.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“It came to me then that I could take comfort in knowing my father and my mother were dead, that death's mystery had already embraced them. They had gone on ahead, had broken the trail, and because of that, death seemed a little cozier, a little safer, a little less terrifying. Because my parents were already there - in death - I saw I could afford to enjoy the sunlight for as long as I possibly could. Sitting beside my father's grave, I was glad - and proud - to be alive.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“The walls inside were charred from some ancient fire, blackened and lichened and weathered hard, smelling faintly of a smoke so old there may be no one still alive who could possibly remember the flame.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“I have to admit that this notebook, with its wilderness of blank pages, seems almost more threat than gift—for what can I write here that it will not hurt to remember? You”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
“But whether I touch him or I run, whether I’m dreaming or I’m awake, on his birthday or on all other days, my whole life has been contaminated with the fact that he is dead.”
― Jean Hegland, quote from Into the Forest
Jean Hegland
Born place: in Pullman, Washington, The United States
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“the dream had come again, like the sun after a storm. It was the same dream that had come many times before, battering down the doors of my mind night after night since i was a child. it was the sort of dreams all girls dream, i suppose- a dream of mysterious worlds and hidden doorways, of leaves that breathe and make music when they are rustled in the wind, and river that bubbles and froth with secrets.”
― Kailin Gow, quote from Bitter Frost
“It goes without saying that you could not vanquish the ignorant masses around you; little by little, as you advance in life, you will be obliged to yield and to be swallowed up in the crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; life will stifle you, but you will all the same not have disappeared without having exerted an influence; of women like you, there will be after you perhaps only six, then twelve, and so on, until finally you will become the majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing. Man has need of that life and if it doesn't yet exist, he must sense it, wait for it and dream of it, prepare to receive it, and to achieve that he must see and know more than our grandfathers and fathers saw or knew.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Three Sisters
“Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.”
― Tahir Shah, quote from House of the Tiger King: The Quest for a Lost City
“Shit. I was stuck. I suspected Dick would skip the hassle of having to ferry me back and forth to talk to someone and instead convince my mom to toss me into a mental ward where I could stay out of his hair and he'd have her all to himself. I imagined myself wearing institutional pajamas and having to eat everything with a spoon because no one would trust me with a fork or knife. Most likely my roommate would be some freakish, giant-size woman who didn't speak because she'd chewed off her own tongue.”
― Eileen Cook, quote from Unraveling Isobel
“How many times can a person break you heart?”
― C.K. Kelly Martin, quote from I Know It's Over
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