Katie Pagan

“If Trump said it was a joke, reporters reported that claim. They wanted to believe that some norms still held. Some feared that if they acknowledged just how far beyond norms he’d gone, they’d be normalizing the new American spectrum, one in which dictatorship had become not just a hyperbolic charge thrown around by each party’s most heated partisans but an actual idea.”
― Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

“Grief will be worn like a cloak, will drag along behind me, heavy.”
― Emma Glass, Rest and Be Thankful

“casual acceptance of—even commitment to—human deprivation, to unemployment, inflation, and disastrously reduced living standards. This is even seen as essential therapy: out of the experience of unemployment and hunger will come a new and revitalized work ethic, a working force eager for the discipline of free enterprise.”
― Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate

“Our former selves are never dead. We speak to them, arguing against decisions we know will bring only unhappiness, offering consolation and hope, even though they cannot hear.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land