Erin

“With all that had passed between him and Rick, the friendship felt constantly volatile in his hands, like unstable explosive. Yet even with Kaylyn standing there in the water, looking as gorgeous and iridescent as a dragonfly, he felt a surge of love and regret unlike anything he’d experienced before. Because they were just kids, and that day they drank and they danced and they laughed at the sky-blue heavens, and it really felt like anything could be fixed and anything could be forgiven.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“The
last of his useless generation would die watching this down payment on chaos unspool.
Holly, Catherine, and their peers would witness civilization entering its violent
disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and
armed conflict over water and arable land.”
― Stephen Markley , The Deluge

“Yeah, well, time marches on. Getting caught up in causes don’t interest me. Not anymore. Especially when you see the scope of what this is.” He took the Heinz ketchup bottle from the condiment holder. “That’s the thing: Most people don’t understand this. The ingredients, what it goes on, where the energy comes from to create it, the ways the world’s gotta be directed and coaxed and violated and controlled to get this one little fucked bottle. And once you see how ketchup relates to imperial maintenance it’s tough to not get an overwhelmed quality to your thinking. Like one of them Magic Eye thingamajobs—hard the first time, but once you get it, you’ll never unsee it.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“The natural world existed for her, as it did for most of the Global North, only as another theme park, a Disneyland. One of the luxuries of modernity was never having to consider how the asphalt from a parking lot could crush soil, disrupt a delicate system, banish a pocket of insects, birds, or small mammals to ruin. Or that this parking lot was merely a microcosm of something far larger and darker: a war on the living biosphere.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio