Jordan West

“There was nothing new that could happen and he didn't understand why more people could not come to this realization. The same things are born and the same things die and the same river flows and the same fire burns. The same hearts break and the same fools rise. There was a gift in such knowledge and he allowed it to carry him without regard to provocation or concern for consequence as if he was only a chess piece being moved about the world.”
― Michael Farris Smith, Lay Your Armor Down

“Is life only a recurring dream or nightmare dredged up from the strata and layers of your subconscious? A fable or fairy tale you absorbed sitting on the lap of your monkey uncle or your ancestral ant? All the lies we had to tell just to survive, and all those who died, Who has any humanity left? What reason do we have to go on like this, depending on the little holidays and celebrations, birthdays, weddings and graduations, anniversaries, communions, baptisms, deaths, assassinations, all these events to mark our passage through space, crawling over the face of this earth with such determination and purpose? Is it only our fear of death that's kept us going so long? You cease, and then what? Will things change so much? You disintergrate into that churning flurry, our siblings of the earth, beetles and larvae, microbes and bacteria, tilling the soil with their mandibles and pincers, their claws, jaws and specialized proboscises, infusing and secreting acids and enzymes and detergents, they'll have us tilled up in no time, turned into compost, humus, ready for the spring planting. And that age-old problem of the thing called I? No more. Subsumed by we, they, the writhing mass of existence. For lack of a better word call it God, call it eternity. Better still, call down to the deli, order us all a pizza. We'll need our strength for the struggle ahead. To the ramparts, boys and girls. Carpe diem.”
― REYoung, Unbabbling

“POLITICS IS THE ART OF CONTROLLING YOUR ENVIRONMENT"

This is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks "it doesn't matter who's President" has never been drafted and sent off to die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World - or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on private property - or been hounded by the IRS for purely political resasons - or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts waiting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the ESPN.com Sports Desk

“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.
Well, then, for the sake of one's sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think that things are more important than people--and they do--well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things.”
― James Baldwin