Thoughts. The mental depictions and manifestations of your emotions. It’s amazing how thoughts can both rule the world, and ruin your life. The thoughts of great men have shaped the world we live in. Ideas, principles, and dreams have caused revolutions, formed religions, and both began and ended wars. But the thoughts wheeling around in your own mind can break free, spinning like gears slipping out of unison, destroying the machine they were created to keep functional. Eventually you look inside yourself and find that all of your gears have slipped, and you are no longer a working machine, you are scrap. Your owners take you and sell you for each of your constituent parts until eventually there’s not even the slightest sign that you were once a whole unit that functioned, much less a person.
– From my work-in-progress novel.