Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing Quotes

“I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one's head, from dreaming in the fort of one's home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“There can't be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to help us keep going.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“There must be a way to say yes and yet not base this yes off a life of no. There must be a way to say yes where you cross the river, face the corpse and stare into the dead eyes. Just as you accept the broken levee, the flooded and ruined city. The angry skies, the rising human numbers, and seas racing inland. The ice melting, also. I think without the yes, there is nothing but lies and the ticking of the clock as we wait for the end of our time like a prisoner in a cell.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“Two things I can assert: There is no other. And the future has begun and fear of the future is of no value because it cannot be avoided, negotiated, rejected. Or embraced.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“My beliefs are dull and dismissed out of hand. I believe that resources are limited and that no existing or imagined energy system can sidestep this fact. I believe that the increase in human numbers inhales ever more resources. I believe no energy system will deliver the punch of our declining fossil fuels at the same price. I believe no energy system will solve our problems since the problems come from within us and not from our turbines. I believe in red wine. And the scent of women. And the nuzzle of all dogs of all ages. I believe political systems create no resources but devour them at varying rates. I believe the politics of the right and left matter not at all to the bird on the wing or the trees dying on the hillsides. I believe in the future because the future is here and I am in it. I believe. Not wonder. Not doubt. Not know. I believe. I believe in the dead city. I believe in the nest. I also believe in the late quartets of Beethoven and Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Oh, my God, do I believe.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“But words are all I have, my skills are limited and the words at best are a veil, maybe even a shroud, between us and this world we touch but cannot embrace, a ball of dirt we stand on but never can really know. We want a clean thing, we want ten commandments, a list of solid answers, a form we fill out and then we’re done with the mysteries, perhaps, a chant we can murmur in the dark hours. But the real writing is not on any page, it is everywhere.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“Names don’t help me much anymore. They belong to that time when everything was kept in its place. Before the winds came up and the water came up and licked the land away, this land is your land, this land is my land, this land is gone. For more than fifty years I have come to this place, a city older than our flag, and now it is dead. Nine months ago I was in the dead city after the wind rose, the levees breached, and water came in. Two months ago I was again in the dead city. Soon, I know I must return to the dead city.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“Reading Charles Bowden is like climbing a steep mountain at night, alone, with the trail disappearing behind you. He lures you along with clear beautiful sentences.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

“The arts also fail me. Words I know too well to trust. The skeleton of grammar creates a wall that wards off sensation. Sex can only be described sequentially, one stroke after another. Vocabulary discerns distinctions, just as hormones sand down such matters. The visual arts frame things so that they are safe. Dance is the twitching of the body of one species. Music, I still retain hope for music, that bath of sound that words can barely describe and seldom add to. Music echoes with the bark, the grunt, the trilling, the scream, the explosion of the volcano, the purring of the stream. Art seems less an open door than a gilded cage. Van Gogh painted about three hundred canvases during his year in that nut house. The others, the splattering expressionists and impressionists and cubists and dada folk and surrealists, they’re safe. A dripping clock can never punch you in the face like crows rising off a wheat field. I think most of human art and all of human costume results from our notorious discomfort with our own skins.”
― Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future