Two tough New Yorkers transplanted to Vermont

Fall foliage at Lake Willoughby, in northern Vermont

“I was happy, but am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn’t so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has to look up to them from the cellar stairs.’’

Grace Paley (1922-2007), American writer and teacher and native of the Bronx, in An Interest in Life. In later life, she lived in Thetford, Vt.

“If the environment were a bank, it would have been saved by now.’’

Bernie Sanders (born 1941), a native of Brooklyn who’s now a U.S. senator from Vermont (which has some of the strongest environmental protections in the country). He’s a former mayor Burlington.