Bryan Bougher

“I also know they might be nothing more than a man hungry for meanings inventing them where they don’t exist. Arguably, all meanings are invented anyway; and since I have no one to please but myself, and no one to read this who will care, except perhaps one, then I may write as I please, and think as I please, and reread this whenever I can bear it.”
― John Joseph Adams, Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

“These people who came west to “civilize” the heathen—what made them decide to do that? To me it’s completely irrational to go into somebody else’s country and try to tell them how to think, how to pray, how to live, how to raise their children. —Roberta Conner, director, Tamástslikt Cultural Institute”
― Cassandra Tate, Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West

“I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Long since then he’d come to realize that his persistent optimism had to be a form of hysterical insanity. Hell, everybody’s crazy, these days. Yes, he answered himself. But paranoia and depression are adaptive, now. Idealism is only stupid.”
― John Joseph Adams, Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse