Ohio Stephen Markley Quotes

The history had already been written. What is history but an adjudication of memory. And what is memory but a faithless rendering of all sex, death, justice, murder, prayer, greed, hope, mercy, and love. Memory was as molten as the soul.

How to explain that we all show up to this party with no invite and no apparent host, and we can depart from it at any moment for no reason?

Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We've put our birthright at risk because we don't know how to control ourselves. Our lust.

When he began to see the way the world is, not the way the corporate media presented it, not the way his teacher and parents told it, not the way he wished it was, so he wouldn't have to feel guilt. Once he saw the way the world is, in it's most gritty, tactile, overwhelming sadness and injustice, well he could never unsee it.

No matter where you went or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.

Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

It doesn't matter where you come from. Neither does it really matter where you go. It's all the sex and sandwiches in between.

The house sat at the end of the street, forlorn, the lawn browning, a testament to how the world never works out the way you think it will, let alone the way you want it to.

Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you're outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you're too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don't do such a thing all the time.

How quickly contempt can dissipate when faced with the pathetic humanness of another person. You see inside them for even the briefest moment and suddenly empathy blows through. A dark sky cleared by a hard rain.

It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It’s why he dreaded the moment when they’d have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.

It's hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

I tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.

What an important lesson for every young person to learn: If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loves you, will be the ones to collect the debt.

Yet his friend was in no way standard. He was freewheeling, mule-stubborn, and cunning as a coyote trickster. He had whole oceans inside of him, the wilds of the country, fierce ghosts, and a couple hundred million stars.

Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another

Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he'd spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.

but there comes a point when a man can no longer spend all his waking hours looking at the stupid cruelty people regularly visit upon one another.

Sure, he’d left some stuff out, but he figured narrators were always conveniently forgetting essential shit. In the last decade everyone had learned to be a truth masseuse.

Home is a roving sensation, not a place,

No eighteen-year-old is equipped to understand how love can inspire so much shame, so much self-loathing.

You make someone your devil for long enough, and you want to hold onto that. There's something rapturous about hating another person, especially if you have a goddamned good reason.

Beyond the urge to drink and get the vomit taste out of his mouth was the urge for something harder. And beyond the urge for something harder was the urge to remember—the worst addiction of all.

She understood, vividly, that the most astonishing gift of consciousness was also our tragedy, our cliché, our great curse: Love's absolute refusal to ever surrender. And then she was on her way.

The natural world existed for her, as it did for most of the Global North, only as another theme park, a Disneyland. One of the luxuries of modernity was never having to consider how the asphalt from a parking lot could crush soil, disrupt a delicate system, banish a pocket of insects, birds, or small mammals to ruin. Or that this parking lot was merely a microcosm of something far larger and darker: a war on the living biosphere.

He thought of how cruelty created chain reactions, how one act could set off events, could eat through floors like acid, so to think of all the systemic cruelty in the world was to think of acid burning from one floor of a skyscraper down to the basement.

It’s hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

He thought of how cruelty created chain reactions, how one act could set off events, could eat through floors like acid, so to think of all the systematic cruelty in the world was to think of acid burning from one floor of a skyscraper down to the basement.

She forgave him his ravings because she knew how they likely helped: focus your rage, your disappointment, your sorrow onto anything else. Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

Like MacMillan and the clique of teachers and the coaches who all went to the same church and barbecued at one another's houses, much of the country's small-bore civil servants were itching to do some repressing of their own. Millions of Dick Cheney wannabes swelling the ranks, enjoying their little authoritarian fiefdoms.

A contour of starlight put her profile in repose. He wasn’t sure how old you have to be before you know what you feel is not infatuation, that you are not merely dreaming up an idyllic thing; you understand the world differently because of this other consciousness bound to yours. He’d mourned her every moment he’d known her.

It's a strange feeling: to be ashamed and embarrassed of who you used to be. Even with the excuses of youth, inexperience, and influence- her church, her parents, her older brothers, her friends, almost everyone she knew- it still made her deeply uncomfortable to think of herself back then, who she might have hurt without knowing it.

You know.” He twisted his coaster. “My father once told me that it’s on other people to let go of their fear and prejudice. And this was a man who had his shop burned to the ground because he tried opening in a white neighborhood in Cincinnati. It’s their problem, he said, and that’s on them. But he also told me that it’s on you to give people a chance to change.

With all that had passed between him and Rick, the friendship felt constantly volatile in his hands, like unstable explosive. Yet even with Kaylyn standing there in the water, looking as gorgeous and iridescent as a dragonfly, he felt a surge of love and regret unlike anything he’d experienced before. Because they were just kids, and that day they drank and they danced and they laughed at the sky-blue heavens, and it really felt like anything could be fixed and anything could be forgiven.

Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind? Until her conversation with Hilde, Stacey had had no conception of how deep and aching this chasm inside herself was. Before that strange confluence of Hilde and Gaia she’d never really considered herself as part of any ecological system, and this came to astonish her later. How people walk through their lives nearly in a coma, unaware of the physical substrate that surrounds them.

I mean we are no longer cataloguing life with art, which is perhaps why art is failing. Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred generations to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We’ve put our birthright at risk because we don’t know how to control ourselves. Our lust.

tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.” Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

Bill tried to open his mouth and say it: What he'd admitted to Dan Eaton earlier that night. What he'd wanted to say ever since he'd understood his own hapless, coward's heart... "You and Rick both had this idea. That if you can't save all of mankind, you've completely failed. I know he forgives you, Bill. Even if you'll never believe it, he forgives you.

New Canaan had this look, like a magazine after it’s tossed on the fire, the way the pages blacken and curl as they begin to burn, but just before the flames take over.

You make someone your devil for long enough, and you want to hold on to that. There's something rapturous about hating another person, especially if you have a goddamned good reason.

For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.

...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.

The outline of the woods, wet and stark against night’s blue-black pool. Stars and moon all swimming out there in the infinite. It made him think that if he could stretch his vision far enough, he could see to the end of it all, where the universe simply trickled back to God’s eye.

Beaufort poured himself more beer while he thought on this. Of course Todd Beaufort would fall into that camp. Most men who never serve do. Hed always worn blank dog tags, Soine inscrutable statement about his badassedness, and Dan could see the chain now. Even before the wars, he was emulating behavior many civilians would come to follow: wrapping themselves in the theater of war, pretending at honor and sacrifice without actually bothering with either of the two. Flag and bumper sticker patriot without any idea of just how gruesome the business of it could be. How rancid, wet, and sticky it was.

navigating

Some people just vanished, whole families blinked out of existence like the Rapture.

So he stole two Vals, and went about feeling like sexy melted marshmallow the rest of the night.

She was incapable of articulating how alive this place had seemed when she was young, how much energy you could feel here. She could only see it through his eyes now: a dingy town getting dingier. Nostalgia shielding the rest.

Though they’d been teenage enemies of a sort, he also felt the fraternity: once handsome, marbled, small-town athletes who couldn’t understand why they hadn’t conquered the world.

Love was a marketing strategy, but every ad campaign lost its zest in the end. Every romantic bond eventually turned into the Yo Quiero Taco Bell dog.

Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.

The casket was returned to Walmart.

came before were fated to live and die so that it might triumph. Dan smiled through bandages and tears because he remembered a Calvin and Hobbes strip about that very idea. The author had a different vision: he owned a painting by an artist named Paul Klee called Angelus Novus, in which an angel seems to hurtle backward, wings spread, eyes fixed, mouth agape, and his description of the Klee painting was something Dan had never been able to get out of his head, his memorization hopelessly accidental: “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” the author wrote. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to

The author wrote it in France in 1940, just as the Vichy government was handing over Jews to the Gestapo. He finished writing just before he escaped the collaborationist government, only to commit suicide in Spain a month later. With his newly acquired monocular vision, Dan struggled, word by word, through the unsettling conclusion that one cannot look at the treasures of his society without feeling horror. Because when we look at history we only empathize with the victor, an empathy that benefits the current ruler. This ruler comes from a long line of those who’ve stepped over the stricken body of the one who came before, each an heir to a long line of violence and power. So the spoils of resources and culture get carried along in a direct procession, and it becomes difficult to contemplate any document of civilization as anything but a document of barbarism. The inevitability of progress being such a hopeless fantasy. Progress, the author warned, is ephemeral. The notion of progress lies in each successive generation’s “weak Messianic power.” How each one considers itself the conclusion of history: all who

All history was cyclic. And these cycles beget us, even if we didn’t understand them as we live them. Cycles of politics, cycles of exploitation, cycles of immigration, cycles of organization, cycles of accumulation, cycles of distribution, cycles of pain, of despair, of hope.

It was clear to her why New Canaan wasn’t the magical realist space she’d imagined, the same reason it always took her mother two hours to shop for groceries: in a small town you just ran into a hell of a lot of people you knew.

You know, it’s amazing. I’ll never get over it,” he said, sweeping a hand enthusiastically before tucking it back into the handle of his mug. “I see some of you kids I had in class years and years ago, and I can never believe the way you grow into yourselves as adults. Thirty years of teaching, and it still makes me want to cry tears of joy every time. It’s really an incredible gift to be able to see that. Especially a young woman like you who had so much potential.” “Then

Point is . . .” His eyes flitted up and back down. “We lack a whole lot of imagination about violence. We want to chalk it up to ‘psychos,’ whatever that means. It’s a notion that feels safe. It’s comforting. But shit like My Lai or Auschwitz or Gnadenhutten—that’s not aberrant. It happens because of what we all have in common. How frail we are. We’re insecure, we’re greedy, we want a promotion at work, we’re afraid of the guy in charge—that’s the stupid, mundane bullshit that makes people do terrible things to each other.

This was February, the darkest month in the Midwest. There was thick, week-old snow outside and ice coating every surface. It caught all the light of the stars and glittered in shifting, restless arrays. It captured the errant glow of a streetlamp and reflected it, silver and blue, through the blinds. It

Of course, he’d long resented Rick for pinning Kaylyn to his hip. They had a certain Ohio symmetry Bill could never mimic. They were sweethearts who were born in this town and believed in it, believed they were fated to raise a family here and cheer for all the Jaguar teams as long as civilization stayed standing. Bill was a transplant, a New Yorker who accidentally grew up in this struggling shitburgh, who just happened to fall for its native daughter.

What it came down to, though, was this: like everyone else, she’d vanished from his life. He could only stare at the dark and wonder what had become of her.

Problem is, there’s no raging against the machine because the machine just consumes whatever objection anyone makes about it.

This was about disappearing. People, she’d come to understand, disappeared all the time. The world simply opened its jaws and swallowed them whole. They vanished, and unless they were rich or famous or particularly beautiful, they did so almost without comment. There was bitterness at murder, grief at accidents, and fury at suicide. But to disappear—well, there was only mystery. And mystery was all three of those things bundled together and made more frightening by the impossibility of it.

She sometimes thought she could feel God inside of her again, that she had somehow, against all odds, plunged into unfathomable hope.

People tended to roll their eyes at this small-town politicking and then go out and vote based on it anyway.

Tina once had a theory about love, which was that you can only have—really, truly—one love of your life. You could be in love with more than one person. You could let multiple men have sex with you. You could even come to care about a certain person more than that one love, as she had with Cole. But in the end, you only had the one Love of Your Life. For most people, that love happened early.

There was something attractive about a person so selfless, so relentlessly decent, who clearly cared about her so much that he made her family the first priority in his life.

He turned his attention to the baseball game, and as she departed into the warm fluid of the night, she marveled at how many extremely decent people she’d known in this place. How much she’d taken them for granted.

Because when your waking mind is consumed at all times by wanton devastation, by oblivion, you have no choice but to dream of courage.

Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another.

You tell people you served and your hand was always sore from the enthusiasm of their grip, but they took the tax cuts and were happy to forget about both conflicts between election cycles.

Only in hindsight do you understand you could probably correlate the cliques of high school directly to each family’s bank account.

He never thought any of them would be afraid. But Kaylyn was the first person he really lost, and the one who left him wide awake and staring pointlessly at the dark.

These Jesus kids all got away with this facade, dripping with self-righteousness while they pulled all the same shit the rest of the sinners did (and occasionally much worse). A few of the images of Tina did create a certain feeling, like spiders scuttling on the inside of his stomach, but he enjoyed them nevertheless: not for any sexual reason but for the gratification of discovering hypocrisy in exactly the place he expected.

Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.

Out here on the edges of the fracturing economy, people muled mysterious packages back and forth across the scorched American landscape. Getting all the dirty deeds done.

It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It's why he dreaded the moment when they'd have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.

You’ll never be closer to human beings than in combat. Not your parents, not your wife, not your kids. That sense of duty you leave with—the one toward God and country—evaporates in the murky realities of Baghdad or Kandahar. What’s left is your duty to your friends, your brothers.