Diana Eidson

“The Fulcrum is not the first institution to have learned an eternal truth of humankind: No need for guards when you can convince people to collaborate in their own internment.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it : To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it : Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.”
― James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“The thing that give me the mos' trouble was, it didn' make no sense. You don't look for no sense when lightnin' kills a cow, or it comes up a flood. That's jus' the way things is. But when a bunch of men take an' lock you up four years, it ought to have some meaning. Men is supposed to think things out. Here they put me in, an' keep me an feed me four years. That ought to either make me so I won't do her again or else punish me so I'll be afraid to do her again"- he paused- "but if Herb or anybody else come for me, I'd do her again. Do her before I could figure her out. Specially if I was drunk. That sort of senselessness kind a worries a man.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath