Tanner Allison

“A unionist who had borne the brunt of the organizing battles in Harlan County once showed me a blue steel Smith and Wesson pistol which, with a twinkle, he referred to as a "John L. Lewis peacemaker." When I asked him if the union had issued the firearm to him he smiled slyly but made no reply except to puff on his pipe.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area

“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

“Knowing oneself is a complicated business, because knowing one version of oneself can be a defense against knowing and being surprised by other versions of oneself.”
― Stephen A. Mitchell, Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time

“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