Charles Bowden > Quotes

“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”
― Charles Bowden

“I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine; I insist on color.”
― Charles Bowden

“I am by nature a person suspicious of the economic machine that feeds me. And yet I am a captive of that economic machine, and my mind is structured by its lessons and demands. I consume its wealth with zest. I drive a truck, watch a color television, and write on a computer, but I cannot overcome the feeling that these objects and the industrial culture that produced them are temporary things, a kind of fat beast feeding on the bounty of the earth that will starve to death within the next century, or at least be severely diminished.”
― Charles Bowden

“Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN. . . .”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

“Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.”
― Charles Bowden

“I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.”
― Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future

“I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one's head, from dreaming in the fort of one's home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.”
― Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

“Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of a bumbling imperialism. But what...is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States.”
― Charles Bowden, Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez

“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created---civilization, courtesy, decency---is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.”
― Charles Bowden, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present

“The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.”
― Charles Bowden

“We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.”
― Charles Bowden, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present

“There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“FOR YEARS I have carried in my head a thought tossed out
by Aldo Leopold. In the early 20th century, he worked for
the U.S. Forest Service in Eastern Arizona, and he killed a
wolf to protect the cattle and increase the deer. He went
on to become a pioneer in wildlife management and a leading conservationist.
He wrote an essay about that killing. He’d decided
that when he’d pulled the trigger and helped remove the wolf from
the Southwest, he’d made the mountain a lesser place. He said we
had to learn to think like a mountain.
I stare into the gate of rock framing the entrance to Pima Canyon.
The mesquite leaves hang listless in the heat. Underfoot, a broken
field of granite spreads out. Past that stone gate, the freedom
of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness begins. The place feels wanting
without bighorns watching me. I can’t prove this. But I’ve known
it since I was a boy.
That’s why we look at the mountains and crave to be near them.
Maybe we can’t think like a mountain. But we can do better than
we have. We can bring the bighorns back where they belong.
Counting sheep, An Essay by”
― Charles Bowden

“Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juarez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product.”
― Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

“Somehow the United States has become a nation with a permanent air of unreality and yet, by law, custom, or magic, has managed to severely restrict the choice of fantastic roles available to players in this unreality. Halloween is the last night left.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“There can't be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to help us keep going.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“I don’t know what to make of myself. A lot of the time, despite my deepest hungers and best efforts, I see blackness. But I am planting a young oak tree. I really am. It’ll be here centuries after I’m gone. Assuming I choose to leave.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“Safe yield in West Texas has long been abandoned for economic growth.”
― Charles Bowden, Killing the Hidden Waters

“I am not of sound mind. I cannot seem to stop moving - as I write this I have clocked 7,000 miles by truck in the last thirty days and I am hunkered in a motel room high in the Rocky Mountains and yet no nearer to God. I seek roots, just so long as they can accommodate themselves to around seventy-five miles and hour and no unseemly whining about rest stops or sit down dinners. I am, I suspect, a basic American, a perpetual violation that loves the land and cannot kick the addiction of velocity. A person fated never to settle yet always seeking the place to settle. Like cocaine-powered athletes, lying presidents, Miss America, and the Internal Revenue Service, I am not a role model. I am always hungry.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“I try to construct a theory on how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.”
― Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future

“Every fact in this city soon succumbs to magical fraud.”
― Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

“I always remind myself of all the things I should note if I am to be a good person, one sound and balanced. One night . . . I reminded myself that 22 species of flowers were blooming in my backyard. . . . that fact helped a great deal.”
― Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future

“My father believed in evolution but held no brief for progress. He decided after close readings that the ancient Greeks had pretty much figured everything out and since then it had just been a cascade of better data, the benefits of tinkering in the mills and ever finer machines. But no one had gotten any closer to the meaning of life, and no one was likely to get any closer because life exists and the meaning is not part of that existence.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“I am ready for the journey and it comes in steps and leaps with no sense of progress. I’ll tell you what happened but I can’t draw you a map. It wasn’t that kind of learning. Dante invented a topography of the inferno and there really is an inferno, but Dante knew in his bones his geography was simply a way to give form to a seething plasma. So we go to the inferno, we speak of cauldrons, imagine witches chanting, and yet we know these things do not exist, that they are efforts to make hard-edged shapes out of slippery matters. And we are left—in the dark hours of the night when we find it difficult to lie to ourselves—with the memory of the fire and fresh burns on our bodies.”
― Charles Bowden, Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

“I drive but I am never on the road, only the machine touches asphalt. I am not seeking to discover America. Sometimes I’ll drive five thousand miles to a destination and want to leave as soon as I arrive. I have no purpose on the road, but I have an appetite. Part of it is night, headlights barely sketching out the ground flying past. Also, the tired faces in truck stops at midnight where I sip bad coffee for five minutes. I study the lines at the restroom when a bus stops and the homeless line up for relief. The stale pizza under heat lamps gives off a soft glow of rot.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“The roots getting thicker by the year, at first fine lines like lace on the bark of our lives, the skin of our life, the hopes of our life, and then coarsening as more and more wealth and power and energy surges through and at first the roots begin to look like snakes, then like cables and later like giant aqueducts, the hidden heart pounding to the beat of explosives, this massive web becomes fat and arrogant and when the ax sinks in there is nothing but blood, geysers of blood, thick, sticky, virulent. CAUTION: Do not dab it against your tongue. The lab report is never returned to us, we can only guess. But clearly bad blood.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America