Railroad Decay 1

“Her face to me is full of meaning more truthful and more terrible and, I think, more noble than any generalization about people could have prepared me for or could describe for me now.  I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.”

          -Eudora Welty, commenting on a photo of a suffering woman in Mississippi during the Great Depression, from her book of photographs One Time, One Place

Railroad Decay 2

“There is a human wildness held beneath the skin that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.  I can’t walk in the shoes cobbled for me.  They weren’t devised by poets but by shoemakers.”

            -Jim Harrison

Railroad Decay 3

“The birds and their omnipresent language, their music, have resisted conclusions as surely as the stars above them which they use for navigation.  I have prayed willingly to their disinterest, the way they look past me into the present, their songs greeting both daylight and dark.”

            -Jim Harrison