“They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.”
“Because she knows what it's like to live in a world of black, and black, and the tiny bit of white, but when she escaped it, she didn't find the rainbow of colors, the dresses, the singing, the dancing. She only found ugliness.”
“Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.”
“It's always easier to take something than work for it...”
“I can't tell which direction is right or wrong anymore, but I know I want to stay.”
“It's hard to be the person who gets left behind, and never the person who gets to do the leaving.”
“Sometimes we don't know what we're looking for until we find it.”
“What is it about horrible, violent things that capture us?”
“I want to laugh when all the characters start delivering the moral of the story, that all these things they’re looking for have been inside them all along—that that’s where goodness and strength live. They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.”
“And I know I won't get the story out of Zu, not the full one, anyway. That's okay. We're allowed to have our secrets. Starting now, I'm leaving the past alone in the past.”
“(...) It's like all the lights are on, but no one's home. No one cares.”
“D-Dorothy—” My throat burns. It’s the only way I know the words are leaving it. “Guess we…shouldn’t have left Oz.…”
“I start to wonder if maybe the things we're so afraid they'll do to us are the things they have to do to survive the tidal wave of hatred and fear we send coasting toward them.”
“If these parents had been paying attention from the beginning, not running around like a band of panicked chickens, all of them scrabling for thle last scrap of hope, none of them willing to be the one to stand up and question it, they would have seen the lie a mile away.”
“We love you. If you need help, look for my parents - they're using the names Della and Jim Goodkind - and tell them I sent you.”
“The real problem is Mom and the rest of the people in this town don't think big. They're the kind of folks who are too satisfied with the small hand life's dealt to think that a bigger pot might be out there.”
“I just want us all to stop lying.”
“I'm not saving you," I remind her. But something makes me wonder if she even wants me to.”
“Okay, two brothers and a sister. Interesting. If they aren't with her, they must be too old to be affected by the psi virus, in camps, or dead.”
“Nothing changes if you don’t take a risk.”
“Handbrake found the drive to Jaipur that morning particularly frustrating. The new tarmac-surfaced toll road, which was part of India’s proliferating highway system, had four lanes running in both directions, and although it presented all manner of hazards, including the occasional herd of goats, a few overturned trucks and the odd gaping pothole, it held out an irresistible invitation to speed. Indeed, many of the other cars travelled as fast as 100 miles”
“I admit to a feeling of pride that my father had saved the day yet again, although I also thought that nothing would have been better for me personally than for the mullah to force my father's departure within the hour. Either way, I know now that nothing would have stopped my father from his Jihad. If he could not remain in Afghanistan, he would go to Pakistan. If Pakistan pulled the welcome mat, he would go to Yemen. If Yemen threw him out, he would journey to the middle of the most hostile desert where he would plot against the West. Violent Jihad was my father's life; nothing else really mattered. Nothing.”
“And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.”
Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.
Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one.
The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks.
They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.
More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.”
“Tell me Georgia, does he make you come so hard you forget your own name?”
“I don't have a ring. I don't have a pretty speech prepared. All I know is that I love you more than life itself and I want every single person in this room to know that I want you forever, Shaw Landon. I love you. Marry me."
Typical Rule: he didn't ask, he just told her.
"Be an Archer. Be mine.”
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