Jack Peplinski

“I asked him how he was doing, and he said, “I am happy, sir. I am encouraged.” He loved that word. Who wouldn’t? Encouraged, like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“This is a book about dreams and illusions, escape and survival, triumph and despair. It is also a book about foolish optimism, political cunning, naivete, greed, scandal, and opportunism. It is a book about the search for Utopia, the promise of a Promised Land, and so it treats of hope, fulfilment, and liberation as well as drudgery, loneliness, and disenchantment. What we are dealing with here is a phenomenon rare, if not unique, in history: the filling up of an empty realm, a thousand miles broad, with more than one million people in less than one generation.
This, then, is the story of the creation of a state within a state and the resultant transformation of a nation. There are grafters in this tale and hard-nosed politicians and civic boosters with dollar signs in their eyes; but there are also idealists, dreamers, and visionaries. And since these last are in the minority it is best to start with the first of them, a Slavic professor of agriculture named Josef Oleskow; who saw in the untrammelled Canadian West a haven for the downtrodden of Eastern Europe.”
― Pierre Burton

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection