Mark Gannon

“If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.”
― Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

“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

“When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of “highlight.”
― David "AWOL" Miller, AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

“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