“Do you thinking not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"--Robert Redford from the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor”
“I needed a day job that required me mostly to use my mind and hands, because my heart and soul belonged to my dreams.”
“The Central Intelligence Agency, America’s best-known spy shop. In that fearful post-Joe McCarthy era, when assassinated JFK had publicly loved James Bond and secretly been entangled in covert intrigues like assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro outsourced to the Mafia by our spies, the CIA was a myth-shrouded invisible army. In those pre-Internet days before electronic books, Web sites with varied credibility, and search”
“The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin.”
“Ask them, then. ...Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them, when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it.”
“nobody knew i was broken, that my body reared up and betrayed me on a regular basis.”
“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
“The most insightful thing I ever heard, was overheard. I was waiting for a rail replacement bus in Hackney Wick. These two old women weren’t even talking to me - not because I’d offended them, I hadn’t, I’d been angelic at that bus stop, except for the eavesdropping. Rail replacement buses take an eternity, because they think they’re doing you a favour by covering for the absent train, you’ve no recourse.
Eventually the bus appeared, on the distant horizon, and one of the women, with the relief and disbelief that often accompanies the arrival of public transport said, ‘Oh look, the bus is coming.’ The other woman - a wise woman, seemingly aware that her words and attitude were potent and poetic enough to form the final sentence in a stranger’s book - paused, then said, ‘The bus was always coming.”
“After Blakely delivered that infamous and muchrepeated set down, he transferred his gaze to the new
Marchioness of Blakely.
She shook her head, once. Firmly. “Gareth,” she said dryly. “It is your sister’s wedding day. Behave.”
Silence. He’d lifted his chin, in typical Blakely arrogance.
The crowd waited for the blast.
And then Lord Blakely shrugged and grinned helplessly.
Grinned. Helpless. A Blakely.
“Oh,” said his sister, from where she stood near him. “Is
that how it’s done? I’ll have to practice that.”
Like that, everything society knew about nine generations of Blakelys went up in smoke.
Since that day, there had been no question. Lady Blakely had been granted otherworldly powers at birth.
Every smile she coaxed from him, every laugh that she surprised from his lips, stood as testament to her arcane abilities.
And those that questioned her worth still had only to see the look in his eyes when he watched her to find all the
proof they required.”
“A hasty quarrel kindles a fire, And a vigorous quarrel sheds blood. 12 If you blow on a spark, it will kindle a fire, But if you spit on it, it will be quenched; Yet both come out of your mouth.”
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