“Working homicide for so many years, Bosch could not be surprised anymore by the horrors people inflicted on each other. But the horrors people saved for themselves were a different story.”
“He had lived alone most of his life. He was used to places that were empty. He knew the real shelter of a home was inside yourself.”
“The rich kept you waiting so you could feel free to admire all that they had.”
“People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”
“Overreacting as usual,” Bosch said. “One fire and they’re all there, showing the flames. You know what that does? That’s like throwing gasoline on it. It will spread now. People will see that in their living rooms and go outside to see what is happening. Groups will form, things will be said and people won’t be able to back down from their anger. One thing will lead to another and we’ll have our media-manufactured riot.”
“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”
“The excitement and adrenaline that accompany a new case caused a false high that always wore off quickly.”
“The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.”
“Everyone was oblivious to the seething hatred and anger that churned in other parts of the city — beneath the surface like an undiscovered fault line waiting to open up and swallow all above.”
“Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass.”
“Somebody once called the media the merchants of chaos.”
“Spread those strong wings of yours. Fly.”
“Then know this. Between and beneath and beyond anything else i may be, i am yours. I will never leave you. never forsake you. You may rely upon sun to rise and moon to fall. For you are the heart of me.”
“The emphasis on shifting essences, uncertainty, and fiercely contrasting opposite states was, of course, neither new nor unique to Byron. He and the other Romantic poets, however, took the ideas and emotions to a particularly intense extreme. Shelley's belief that poetry "marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change," and that it "subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things," was in sympathy not only with the views of Byron but those of Keats as well. "Negative capability," wrote Keats, exists "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching out after fact & reason." The "poetical Character," he said:
has no self-it is every thing and nothing-It has no character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated-It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation.”
“They’d been afloat now without food, water, shelter, or sleep for over forty hours. Of the 1,196 crew13 members who’d set sail from Guam three days earlier, probably no more than 600 were still alive. In the previous twenty-four hours alone, at least 200 had likely slipped beneath the waves or been victims of shark attack. Since the sinking, each boy had been floating through the hours asking himself the same hard question: Will I live, or do I quit?”
“I don't think we're ever anybody's, and to believe otherwise will get you hurt.”
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