World Made by Hand Quotes

“Jesus, [...] look how we live? I'm… a serf.”

“We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved.”

“The essence of politics was to not act on your impulses.”

“Wikipedia: World Made by Hand”

“Could we even pretend the law still existed? Or was it something you made up now, as the occasion required?”

“I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were.”

“Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was.”

“I remembered Albany... as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs.”

“Waterford began its existence as the gateway to the Erie Canal system, the first stretch of which was built to bypass several waterfalls on the Mohawk River.”

“We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. It's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time.”

“Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didn't talk about it; it was so demoralizing.”

“We were content to be undisturbed in our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the Empire State, where the Battenkill runs into the Hudson River.”

“There's real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, […] it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things.”

“The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices... were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation.”

“Whatever the other failures of the U.S. government were, it had managed to print an excess of dollars which, combined with the collapse of trade and communication, had severely eroded the currency's value.”

“We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I kept on the mantel in the living room, and it was the only timepiece in the house that worked anymore.”

“... I had a pistol every bit as lethal tucked in the rear of my belt, next to my skin, underneath my shirttails. I'd been carrying it [for] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in.”

“I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out until there was nothing.”

“It was more possible that the human race possessed some spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show.”

“You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and... advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.”