Alan Mills

“The telegraph kept this all moving fast. The whole transaction between Wheeling and Washington took place in a matter of hours, and could have done so if the ends were San Francisco and Washington. So now, of course, a man could make a stupid decision much faster. So Hayes’s natural caution made sense.”
― Cecelia Holland, Blood on the Tracks

“NFL in general: Millionaire babies taking to the field to shuck, jive and juke for elderly billionaire plantation masters. The players who do take a stand by kneeling are vilified, nullified and ostracized. And fans continue to subsidize this cirque du soulless in some publicly funded, corporate-owned stadium with the audacity to charge ten dollars for a cup of warm beer, eight dollars for cold hot dogs and ninety dollars for jerseys bearing terminally concussed gridiron legends’ names and numbers.”
― Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter

“And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. “Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,” according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness