Michael Staggs

“The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose. The wind was there when President Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet. It smelled of gunpowder at Antietam. It ran with the buffalo and touched tentative fingers to the tall black hats of Puritans. It has carried shouts of love, and it has dried tears to salt tracks on more faces than it can number.”
― Libba Bray, The Diviners

“Halloween was a night when the dead came alive because the living were more alive: happy children high on candy, angry teenagers with eggs and shaving cream tucked into their hoodies, drunk college students in masks and wings and horns giving themselves permission to be something else—angel, demon, devil, good doctor, bad nurse. The sweat and excitement, the over-sugared punches loaded with fruit and grain alcohol.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“To me, faith is the opposite of intelligence, because faith means believing something blindly. I don’t know why God—if there is a God—gave us these brains if we’re going to believe things blindly.”
― Abraham Riesman, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

“Men who had been doctors and lawyers in the Old Country were reduced to roving as street peddlers. “This was the boasted American freedom and opportunity,” said Ravage, “the freedom for respectable citizens to sell cabbages from hideous carts, the opportunity to live in those monstrous, dirty caves that shut out the sunshine.”
― Abraham Riesman, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee