“It's the government's hooked us on hillbilly heroin so we don't even give a damn.”
         marijuana smoker in Hazard, Kentucky

 “Sounds like Euripides got mixed up with Aristophanes, both of them drunk on a quart jar, if you get my drift.”
         English professor, University of Matewan

“It won't end till the last lump of coal is gone.”
         kayaker on the Gauley River, before he drowned

  “These poems read like Mark Twain gone to Hell in Boone County.”
        scholar of American literature, Man University

 “Floods all the time.  Ain't nothing dry to care about any more.”
        mother in temporary housing in Williamson

 “A paranoid mix of hysteria and depression.”
        clinical psychologist in Charleston

 “We're all leaving West Virginia.”
        teenager in Madison

 “It's not exactly the end of the world we're talking about here.”
        a County Tax clerk in Logan

 “If the stripping don¹t get you, the clear-cutting will”
        homeowner in Kopperston

 “If poetry aspires to music, these are bluegrass on a lopped-off mountain.”
        musicologist at Becco University

 “They put Blair Mountain on the TV, a lot of good it did.”
        Thelma Blankenship, Cocoa, Florida

 “Vote for the Mountain Party!”
        Coalition for a Coal-Free West Virginia

 “This isn't poetry-it's prose on meth where a mountain was.”
       professor of Popular Culture, College of Amherstdale

 “You buy the book.  I'm leaving.”