Ellie Corey > Ellie's Quotes

“I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine; I insist on color.”
― Charles Bowden

“I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.”
― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”
― Charles Bowden

“I am by nature a person suspicious of the economic machine that feeds me. And yet I am a captive of that economic machine, and my mind is structured by its lessons and demands. I consume its wealth with zest. I drive a truck, watch a color television, and write on a computer, but I cannot overcome the feeling that these objects and the industrial culture that produced them are temporary things, a kind of fat beast feeding on the bounty of the earth that will starve to death within the next century, or at least be severely diminished.”
― Charles Bowden

“Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.”
― Charles Bowden

“I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.”
― Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future

“There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.”
― Charles Bowden, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

“Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of a bumbling imperialism. But what...is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States.”
― Charles Bowden, Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez

“We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created---civilization, courtesy, decency---is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.”
― Charles Bowden, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present

“We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.”
― Charles Bowden, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present