Valerie Hurley

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing.
--Jessamyn West

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
--Margaret Mead

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
--Franz Kafka

Kind words may be short but their echoes are endless.
--Mother Teresa

Leap and the net will appear.
--Zen saying

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
--George Bernard Shaw

My bizarre childhood had a warm center generated by my dad, a single father raising three children during the 1950’s and 1960’s. He was kind, loving, and permissive. I was a dreamy child, one who sat for hours in my mother’s closet after she was rushed off in an ambulance one day when I was nine. She never returned. I loved her taffeta dresses, her foxtails, her mink stole. I sat in the tops of maple trees, studying the neighborhood where I lived, the potato farms covered with houses that Long Island became after World War II. In Catholic school, the nuns tried to interest us in salvation by parading us through the funeral home beside the school. We were expected to offer a prayer as we knelt by the side of the lipsticked, powdered corpse with rosary beads wound through its hands. In the wider world, people were building fallout shelters and spotting flying saucers and manufacturers were selling lead girdles, aluminum pajamas, and drawstring bags to pull up over the head in times of danger.
I later read a government booklet called "Atomic Attack" that said, “Children should be taught to fall instantly to the floor, face-down, elbows out, eyes shut. Should practice falling every night before bedtime.” The nuns taught us the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Maybe an atmosphere such as this could produce a normal, well-adjusted child—but it was not to be me.
Raine Rassaby suffers some of the same maladjustments. Her father is an astronomer and she says to him, "You fell in love with stars, and you've spent your whole life staring at them, and that's what I feel like we all have to do--love something so much that we feel accountable for its demise."