Tanner Allison

“The beaver, in other words, had ceased to be an object of use, conserved because the need for it was slight; instead, it had become a commodity of exchange, conserved because the need for it was great.”
― William Cronon, Changes in the Land

“Here John Shell and his numerous clan of brothers and sisters lived far past the century mark while flagrantly violating the sacred tenets of modern medicine. This leathery old mountaineer loved fat pork and its artery-clogging cholesterol. He smoked and chewed tobacco from daylight to dark, without incurring a trace of lung or throat cancer. He lived in a drafty log cabin and bathed only when it suited him. Yet he managed to live to the ripe old age of a century and a quarter. Of his somewhat less fortunate brothers and sisters who shared his mode of living the shortest-lived of them reached only eighty-nine.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“Thus the land was sowed with bitterness, from which crops of bloodshed were to be harvested for generations to come.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“It was one thing to realize you were shoveling shit against the tide, another to give up the enterprise before you got soiled.”
― Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool