Words&Dirt

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. On the moon Uncle Julian would be well and the sun would shine every day. You would wear our mother’s pearls and sing, and the sun would shine all the time.”

––We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, pg. 75

“Here lies a conundrum. Mexico makes its living by supplying consumer goods to America, and as long as Americans consume drugs, Mexicans will supply them––after all, the idea here is to make things that are cheap to produce and sell them at prices higher than those in legal trade. Without drugs the country would be even poorer than it is, as a vast amount of foreign money would be cut off. With drugs it is even more violent than it would be. The same is true of some of the countries to Mexico’s south.”

––Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall, pg. 225