Jeff Jones

“I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.”
― Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

“The baby was no longer on the verge of death; no longer would the sweet, easy tears of mourning melt it away as if it were a simple jelly. The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack him. Swaddled in skin as red as shrimp which gleamed with the luster of scar tissue, the baby was beginning ferociously to live, dragging its anchor of a heavy lump. A vegetable existence? Maybe so; a deadly cactus.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“There is a fine article in the current Reader’s Digest with the title, “There are No Atheists in Foxholes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night