Dylan

“Now let's move on to the subject of how a real man treats his wife. A real man doesn't slap even a ten-dollar hooker around, if he's got any self respect, much less hurt his own woman. Much less ten times over the mother of his kids. A real man busts his ass to feed his family, fights for them if he has to, dies for them if he has to. And he treats his wife with respect every day of his life, treats her like a queen - the queen of the home she makes for their children.”
― S.M. Stirling, Dies the Fire

“The other thing to remember, of course, is that most people get no help at all. I sure didn't, oh, no: it was just me and Castle, charging, desperate, through the country darkness, and that's how it is for most people who dare to run - no help from no Airlines, no help from no one. They just go, man, after years of planning or in the heat of a sudden moment they go, hurl their skinny bodies over a cyclone fence or purge themselves into a moat, break free of a chain line or a guard's hard grip and run, brother, run, sister, run along back roads and through forests. No planes and no cars or trucks, either. Just brave souls darting across open fields and wading in and out of rivers and stumbling along deer paths through dark woods. Find the star and follow it, as runners have done all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose -- not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are.' And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines

“What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.”
― Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines