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Quote by Ange Minko

“I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn't want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not "getting" a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me — in fact, it was a seduction.”

Quote by Ange Minko

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Ange Minko

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“But if I knew any of this back then, I didn't yet have the vocabulary for that knowledge. And perhaps because of that, without intending to do so, I had continued the pattern of some of the men, and most of the women, in my family, reaching s far back as we had memory. We were careless, and shiftless, and unthinking. We left our ancestral homes, we birthed and sometimes buried our children in far-flung places, and we started afresh over and over. We cared for land, but too often it wasn't our land to care for.”

Immigrant ExperienceExpatsImmigrant Parents
Book:Leaving Before the Rains Come
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“Nick nodded. "My mother said that always surprised her-all the houses made out of wood here, especially in the suburbs. She said growing up in the Soviet Union, it was all concrete and cinder blocks where she lived. Wooden houses were for old Russian fairy tales." Sawyer reflected, mulling. "Have you ever wanted to go there?" "Sure. But growing up, I was always told that's was impossible," he said. "At least for me and my mom, given her political history. But it's strange; there were times when I was super aware that she could never bring me back to where she was from, but other times I felt so completely that I have been there in my mind, I forget that I haven't, even now." "Do you speak Russian?" "Of course. My mom's English is perfectly fine, but we always wind up speaking in Russian together." "Do you ever...dream in Russian?" "I do.”

DiasporaBilingualismImmigrant Parents
Book:Summer Fridays
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“Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”

GreenEcologyConservationWetlandsSwampMarsh
Book:Walden and Other Writings
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“As long as the wetland looks pretty and also attracts ducks from time to time, it is regarded as a complete success. An attractive appearance is fine and is of considerable concern in urban developments. It is the pretense that such wetlands also create rich habitats which is objectionable, when urban development is the primary cause of loss of diversity in a wide range of ecosystems around cities including wetlands. The one ecologically positive thing that most created wetlands do a reasonable job of is water treatment, because the limited range of plants likely to survive the semi-toxic soils and waters of newly created wetlands are invariably colonisers that will also use up a wide range of nutrients.”

HabitatEcosystemWetlandsUrban Encroachment
Book:Wetland Habitats [OP]: A Practical Guide to Restoration and Management
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