Cold and silence. Nothing quieter than snow. The sky screams to deliver it, a hundred banshees flying on the edge of the blizzard. But once the snow covers the ground, it hushes as still as my heart.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the paradox of the serene beauty of snow contrasted with the chaotic energy of a blizzard.
In this quote, Laurie Halse Anderson uses vivid imagery to depict the contrasting sounds of a snowstorm and the profound silence that follows once snow blankets the earth. The tumultuous noise signifies the struggle and chaos of nature, while the stillness that ensues evokes a sense of peace and introspection, mirroring the speaker's emotional landscape.
In practice
During a poetry reading, this quote can be used to illustrate the beauty of winter.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.
The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.
There are few things that have filled me with such breathless awe as flying in the black of night across oceans and continents and looking out my cockpit window upon the infinite glory of millions of stars.
There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet-as if the ocean somehow doesn't matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean...We are learning otherwise.
For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.
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