Aaron DuPlissey

“...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.”
― John Hodgman, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

“I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold

“And Cracknut Whirrun?’ asked Drofd.
‘Straightforward. An old man up near Ustred taught me the trick of cracking a walnut in my fist. What you do is—’
Wonderful snorted. ‘That ain’t why they call you Cracknut.’
‘Eh?’
‘No,’ said Yon. ‘It ain’t.’
‘They call you Cracknut for the same reason they gave Cracknut Leef the name,’ and Wonderful tapped at the side of her shaved head. ‘Because it’s widely assumed your nut’s cracked.’
‘They do?’ Whirrun frowned. ‘Oh, that’s less complimentary, the fuckers. I’ll have to have words next time I hear that. You’ve completely bloody spoiled it for me!”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes

“One day you're something, so promising and full o' dares, so big the world's too small a place to hold you. Then, 'fore you know it, you're old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you'll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Red Country