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Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats QUOTES

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats QUOTES

1 " His shirt is rumpled. His fingers, long and slender, are stained yellow at the tips from smoking. His mind is always on something else. My mind is busy, too, reading every cue and signal, keeping track of all the things that cannot be discussed, that must not be remembered, that have to be erased. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

2 " The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

3 " I have always loved the many moods of the sky at Rocky Flats. Turquoise and teal in summer, fiery red at sunset, iron gray when snow is on the way. The land rolls in waves of tall prairie grass bowed to the wind, or sprawling mantles of white frosted with a thin sheath of ice in winter. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

4 " My family never talks about feelings, and we certainly never talk about plutonium. It's hard to take something seriously if you can't see it, smell it, touch it, or feel it. Plutonium is a cosmic trick. The invisible enemy, the merry prankster. Can it hurt you or not? None of us know. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

5 " I adore my mother, but I fear for her. She seems helpless, caught in the vortex of my father's dark moods and unpredictable behavior. I try never to displease her. I love the scent of Juicy Fruit gum on her breath and the hint of Joy perfume on her neck, the crisp crinkle of her hair stiff with aerosol spray and the chipped pink polish on her nails. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

6 " Plutonium is the darling and the demon of the nuclear age. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

7 " Blue water extends in rows of gentle ripples to a thin line of barely visible cottonwoods on the far side. The wind dies to a whisper and it's quiet, almost perfectly still except for the snap of grasshoppers leaping from the weeds. To the west the mountains rise suddenly, almost violently from the sandy brown of the plains, layered silhouettes of blue and green and gray rising to a turquoise sky. My heart is filled with the beauty of it all. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

8 " From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactures more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers, at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contains enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth. "

― Kristen Iversen , Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats