Mark Gannon

“We are outraged when we are constrained by others, but willfully, unwittingly put limits on ourselves.”
― David "AWOL" Miller, AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian. Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families. Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“That was just the reality in the capital, and the problem is that it all became a little like the way people misused the word ‘literally’ when they really meant ‘figuratively’, and they did it so much that eventually even the dictionary gave up the battle as lost.”
― Keith Taylor, Cordyceps