Population Quotes

“Summer here comes on like a zaftig hippie chick, jazzed on chlorophyll and flinging fistfuls of butterflies to the sun.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485

“[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485

“a place in the present. This, as they say, is where my roots are. The trick is in reattaching.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

“I began to realize how this fire department was a means of reentry, of rediscovering the place I had left a decade before, of recapturing my sense of place one tragedy at a time.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

“Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485

“Small-town folk want to appear skeptic and shrewd, but more than that, we really, really want the newfangled doodad.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

“You want to be a hero bad enough, you make your own disasters.”
― Michael Perry, Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time