Quotes from Suzannah Lessard

am reluctant to characterize Americans as special in any regard, because that has gotten us into so much trouble. Yet we may

life on Earth now. I don't always feel like being a beginner in a foreign language, continuously and mercilessly exposed to that special terror and despair, the deep inadequacy, that the unfamiliar syntax can engender.

We live as in a walled garden now, walled by ourselves. We have been building this wall for some time, but now it's complete. That is new. And yet our surroundings remain as radiantly mysterious as ever.

All was perfectly scaled to the human body and, in that, conducive to a sense of safety, of being at home in a known world.

a federal government given land-use powers would be manipulated by the mercantile barons to their own ends, to the detriment of the common people.

become common. The form of our times is regional, rather than city-centered. The landscape pattern created by work in our time is, interestingly, more like the old agrarian one: it has many centers like a painting by Kandinsky. "Region" is indeed an old word, going back to "kingdom," a time when boundaries were a bit vague, as defined by culture more than law, and, in many cases, topography, especially mountains