49809. “She lifted me back into the seat with a wicked grin, and breathed, ‘Just don’t stop talking. Whatever you do, just don’t stop talking,’ and swallowed my manhood. I scrambled desperately through the darkened corners of my memory until I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed her by the hair and said, ‘Now bend over, and I’ll do to you what the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries wants to keep the Federal government from doing to the state of Alaska.” ― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Indecision Now! A Libertarian Rage
49807. “Rich and poor, strong and weak gave their help in this difficult fight. All this without hate, notoriety, or malice. Finally, Alaska pulled herself out of her deep unnecessary sleep and the laws began to change. Why? Because people were awakened to their obligation to their fellow men. A few times some people tried to discriminate against us but that is almost impossible to do when the object of such action feels no inferiority.” ― Annie Boochever, Fighter in Velvet Gloves: Alaska Civil Rights Hero Elizabeth Peratrovich
49783. “We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God’s plan that we find only in Nature.” ― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America
49781. “Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck — car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake — car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.” ― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone
49773. “The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means “the shores where the sea breaks its back.” The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder.” ― Corey Ford, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story – Georg Steller & the Russian Exploration of AK