"Someone who writes books is either everything (a uniue universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals… For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into and indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words."

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) by Milan Kundera

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

“Townes [Van Zandt] would be one of those people who wouldn’t do anything for a year and then sit down and write five songs in one night.” - James Szalapski

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

“So I went down there and stayed with him [Skinny Dennis] and then just met the people that he knew, Guy [Clark] and Townes Van Zandt. He dragged me over to see David Allan Coe who was kind of very different from them, more outrageous, you know. He’s like the biker. And Townes is the poet and Guy is like [the] superb craftsman/writer…” - James Szalapski

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

“Well, by the early seventies Nashville had sort of become very rigid. All the songs were sounding the same, they just turned out product like crazy and they kept country music in a narrow defined range. But the young guys wanted to do something different. A lot of them had gone through the sixties and had experienced the whole explosion in rock and pop music and wanted open it up a little bit. “LA Freeway” is kind of an anthem for these guys; they went to places like LA and New York and, and discovered it wasn’t where they belonged. Their roots were in the South and they had an emotional connection to their grandparent’s generation there. But when they came back to Nashville and to Austin, Texas they brought back with them the electric guitars and the raw sound of their own generation. But the music they were making connected more to a generation older than the one in place in Nashville.” - James Szalapski

“Well, sometimes I don’t know where, this dirty road is taking me.

Sometimes I can’t even see the reason why.”

- Townes Van Zandt’s Waitin’ Around to Die in Heartworn Highways (1975) by James Szalapski

Song for Zula (2013) by Phosphorescent

“You see, the moon is bright, in that treetop night.

I see the shadows that we cast in the cold, clean light.

My feet are gold. My heart is white.

And we race out on the desert plains all night.”

Coyotes (2006) by Don Edwards

“Well he cursed all the roads, and the oil men,

And he cursed the automobile.

Said this is no place for an hombre like I am,

In this new world of asphalt and steel.

Then he’d look off some place in the distance,

At something only he could see.”

"Despite certain events of the twentieth century, most people in the Western cultural tradition still believe in the Victorian ideal of progress, a belief succinctly defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968 as, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind… [T]hat it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement."

A Short History Of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright

"[Sidney] Pollard notes that the idea of material progress is a very recent one— “significant only in the past three hundred years or so”— coinciding closely with the rise of science and industry and the corresponding decline of traditional beliefs. We no longer give much thought to moral progress— a prime concern of earlier times— except to assume that it goes hand in hand with the material."

A Short History Of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright

"Progress, therefore, has become “myth” in the anthropological sense… Successful myths are powerful and often partly true… Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations… Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are maps by which cultures navigate through time."

A Short History Of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright

"Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies— once mighty, complex, and brilliant— lie the most instructive lessons for our own. Their ruins are shipwrecks that mark the shoals of progress."

A Short History Of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright

"The greatest wonder of the ancient world is how recent it all is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only about seventy lifetimes, of seventy years, have been lived end to end since civilization began. Its entire run occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone."

A Short History Of Progress (2004) by Ronald Wright