Dave

“It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“I reached into my pocket and took the medal and tossed it toward the black opening. It went right in. It disappeared into the darkness.
Then I stepped onto the sidewalk and walked back home. When I got there my parents where doing various cleaning chores. It was a Saturday. Now I had to mow and clip the lawn, water it and the flowers. I changed into my working clothes, went out, and with my father watching me from beneath his dark and evil eyebrows, I opened the garage doors and carefully pulled the mower out backwards, the mower blades not turning then, but waiting.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.”
― Finn Murphy, The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road