Jim Duehr

“Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“Federal gun control of the twentieth century has made machine guns unusual and uncommon, while the absence of serious restrictions on the availability of handguns has given people the opportunity to choose them for self-defense. The scope of the Second Amendment’s protections was not, in other words, defined by the original meaning of the Constitution. The protections were shaped instead by the marketplace choices of twentieth-century consumers, made within the confines of contemporary government regulation.”
― Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America

“The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“This reminds me: Are you going to eat the placenta?” Renée asked Harper. “I understand that’s a thing now. We stocked a pregnancy guide at the bookstore with a whole chapter of placenta recipes in the back. Omelets and pasta sauces and so on.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Harper said. “Dining on the placenta smacks of cannibalism, and I was hoping for a more dignified apocalypse.”
“Rabbit mothers eat their own babies,” the Mazz said. “I found that out reading Watership Down. Apparently the mamas chow on their newborns all the time. Pop them down just like little meat Skittles.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman