Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us. —MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

What good is all this progress if you can’t eat the food or breathe the air or even live on the land when the ocean rises up over it?

Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.

Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.

Yes, it’s easier to write once I get going, but the idea of sitting down every day, talking about what I’ve done. Not even on paper, not even to myself. It’s just hard. Looking in.

When was the last time I didn’t open my eyes with a mental checklist ticking in my brain?

Is Sasquatch the same as Bigfoot?

Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it! —Final radio report by USGS volcanologist DAVID ALEXANDER JOHNSTON before being killed by Mount St. Helens’s eruption on May 18, 1980

believe? I did. His energy, his passion. It’s infectious.

It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.

The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.

Bigfoot’s as American as apple pie and guns in schools.

Facts are supposed to banish monsters… She sighs. …not invite them in.

“Knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.”

I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories.

“People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.”

sapiens. Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution,

I lovewhen I come across the statement of part of the book that the title comes from

You know that old saying, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with?” In the animal world, it’s called “prey switching,” where a predator ends up developing a preference for a certain food source simply because it’s more abundant than their traditional prey.

Why are we always looking for someone else to save us instead of trying to save ourselves?

the dent. Mostar waved it away with, “Forget it.”

“but there won’t be a future if we don’t secure the present.”

They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.