Randall

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto,”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“Whatever the ups and downs of individual candidates and issues, each campaign’s efforts to get out the vote must begin at a lower base level, for every year the Grim Reaper removes another swath of the most politically engaged generation in the American electorate.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

“Like battlefield casualties dryly reported from someone else’s distant war, these unadorned numbers scarcely convey the decimation of American community life they represent. In round numbers every single percentage-point drop represents two million fewer Americans involved in some aspect of community life every year. So, the numbers imply, we now have sixteen million fewer participants in public meetings about local affairs, eight million fewer committee members, eight million fewer local organizational leaders, and three million fewer men and women organized to work for better government than we would have had if Americans had stayed as involved in community affairs as we were in the mid-1970s.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community