Ellie Corey

“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

“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

“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

“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