I’m actin’ pro se. Do you even know what that means?” “Yeah, it’s Latin for ’dumbass.
Things sometimes did not work out. Even if you wanted them to more than anything else. You couldn’t will someone to love you back. You had to move on.
People like to talk about other people’s misery; it makes them feel their own life is somehow better when it usually isn’t.
Politics is a dirty, ruthless business, Agent Robie. It makes the intelligence sector look relatively honorable by comparison.
Give an economist a result you want, and he’ll find the numbers to justify it.
What grade does she teach?” “Eighth. Where kids make the jump from nice, innocent kids to something a lot more complicated and emotional drama runs deep and hormones are out of control. Some days she comes home looking like she got hit by a bus.” “In my book, all teachers are underpaid,” said Decker.
More guns! No guns! Second Amendment! Guns kill! No, people kill!
For me, the Canyon isn’t just a tourist destination. It’s a living, breathing place. It has a dozen plants that live nowhere else.
They were not rich. They were not powerful. They were truly the forgotten.
Find something to believe in, Carter, other than your work. Because when you leave this life, you leave work behind. If that’s all you have, then you have nothing. And eternity is a long time for nothing.
Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget.
I’m not saying that riding the train will change your life, or that passenger rail will be a big moneymaker one day. But no matter how fast we feel we have to go, shouldn’t there be room for a train, where you can just sit back, take a breath, and be human for a little while? Just for a little while? Is that so bad?
They made you hate everyone, even the ones who were like you. That is what they do, so the prisoners will not rise up against them.
The Pullers sat there for a long time together, big, strong, and courageous men transformed back into two little boys by an old man’s loving words that had come a lot later than they should have.
His jumpsuit was white, and on the back were the letters D and R printed in black. They stood for “death row”. Mars had equated it to a snake’s rattle, warning folks to stay the hell away.
It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.
Kids make everything better. And harder.
Robie took a deep, cleansing breath. He had never played well with others. For the last dozen years he had worked in almost total isolation. He preferred it that way. He was better alone than with a team. That’s just how he was built.
But the fact is, as one grows close to death, the only thing that matters is family. I hope you can see that.
In some ways, it was far easier to be bad than good. When you’re bad, you don’t care what happens to anyone other than yourself. When you’re trying to do god, you have to worry about everyone.