Ken Ilgunas QUOTES

41 " I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view? We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us? "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

43 " for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden. While "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

45 " against the walls of the machine. After being slid in, I began to feel the first tremors of panic. In an instant, my world had gotten a lot smaller and darker and weirder. It seemed inevitable that in moments I’d be squealing for someone to get me the hell out of there and flailing my limbs (though to little effect, because one can only move so much in an MRI scanner only fifty-five centimeters wide). But just as quickly as the panic came, it vanished upon being lulled into boredom by the groan of the scanner. After two hours, the technologist pulled me out pink-faced and squinty-eyed. I sat on the scanner bed for a moment, trying to reorient myself to real life. That was awful. I told myself that I’d never do another MRI session, but after she handed me $50, I found myself asking how to sign up for more. I also interviewed to become a tutor at an inner-city elementary school for a work-study program called America Reads. I showed up in my least-wrinkled dress shirt and a pair of slacks that I’d worn "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

47 " You. Koviashuvik is an Inuit word that means “time and place of joy in the present moment. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

49 " We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

51 " The battle over climate change, I thought, like the battle over civil rights, will not be won by convincing disbelievers of facts or appealing to their morality but by passing the torch of reason down to the generations to come, who will replace and laugh at us all. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Trespassing Across America: One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland

53 " The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

55 " My SOUTH sign stopped working on an entrance ramp in a sleepy farm town called Kittitas in the state of Washington. A man who introduced himself as Juan Hernandez—a Mexican immigrant with a contracting business in Yakima—saw me and decided to pull over, even though he wasn’t heading in my direction. He took me to a Wendy’s and, despite my objections, bought me a hamburger and fries, which he watched me eat. He spoke in broken, hard-to-understand English, but his passion for his god and his America was palpable. He spoke with no hint of cynicism, of sarcasm, of guile. He only spoke of how happy he was to raise his baby girl, Genesis, here in America and to be able to buy nice clothes for his family. When he dropped me off, I sat down on my pack and covered my eyes with my hands to hide the tears streaming down my cheeks. This was neither the first nor the last time I had difficulty bearing other people’s generosity. Even though I had liked to think I was a solo adventurer, I realized that I was never really alone. I walked a tightwire above a net of compassion, stretched out by the hands of strangers "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

57 " They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were—in the ways that mattered most—far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

59 " when the arts are scattered onto college campuses, they create a healthy soil into which students can plant themselves and grow into empathetic, introspective, and conscientious citizens. "

― Ken Ilgunas , Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom