#229

“Dark meat, hams gigantic, chest of a smallish horse, plaited with muscle. Were men built like that, he thought: run fifty miles an hour, leap twelve-foot fences, probably still be consuming each other. Truly eating the Enemy's flesh. Difficult tow age modern war, too much flesh destroyed. Everything more personal. Man as he's built now is too puny for his own ego. Flesh the color of the feline. Sweetish, it must be. Sickening. Filthy animals, all of us. Deserve extinction. Except for the brain, thank god. Have to give credit when due. Too much the killer though. Incredibly oversexed. Copulate with anything that will stand still. Two three times a day. Fifty, sixty years of the two-backed beast” (id, 197-198).

#228

“Stealing ins not only supposed to be to be unprofitable and selfish but unmanly and unpatriotic. Stealing something as little and helpless as a bull elk, anyway. Big stealing is something else, but it always happens to big men and they always get caught or ruined. The little man confesses, pleading a lapse of memory, bad health, confusion, on order to prove himself above the littleness of the thing he tried to take home in his lunchpail. The policeman is your friend and the laws are your laws and if in this land you can't tighten enough guts to find an opportunity, then you're not a man at all, you're a pissant. Or crazy. Worse. You can be different, but only if you're different like in everyone else in your area is different” (id, 112-113).

#227

“There sat a coyote, calf-eater, lamb-stealer, fawn-killer and hamstringer – glaring across an old dead cow as if to say: Fuckyou buddy. With or without the words you talk and the gun you pack, I'm ten times the animal you are” (id, 93).

#226

“The entire timber business was a harvest designed to keep the government busy, keep a few dozen or so rich men rich, provide hundreds of jobs for the hicks – and a few lieutenentcies (...) of course, it provided, too, for schools like the one in his small town where he had been taught in twelve compulsive years to read, write and believe. What a hick he had been. Fuck them” (id, 47-48).

#225

“They would listen to America groping for answers, trembling with outrage, pity, compassion, confusion – old men with shaky voices indignant over how things had changed, young kids earnestly delivering the most common clichés as if they had invented them that very instant” (Shetzline, 1969: 21).

SHETZLINE, David (1969). Heckletooth 3. New York, Toronto: Random House.