James Howard Kunstler

"I'd been carrying so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in."

"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. …"

"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."

"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."

"I argued that the human race should have known it was in for trouble, at least we in the United States should have, given how insane our way of life had become. Minor quit blowing into his harmonica l…"

"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."

"We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved."

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