“The nice thing about enemies is you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends."
--General Sergey Voloshin”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of
him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation.
Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew
different parts of the whole story,
but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate
fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder
about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Sandra O'Toole walked back to the nurses' station, remembering what she alone had seen. Kelly's face turning so white that her first reaction to it was that he must be in shock, then the tumult behind her as she reached for her patient -- but then what?
It wasn't like the first time at all. Kelly's face has transformed itself. Only an instant, like opening a door into some other place, and she'd seen something she had never imagined. Something very old and feral and ugly. The eyes not wide, but focused on something she could not see. The pallor of his face not that of shock, but of rage. His hands balled briefly into fists of quivering stone. And then his face had changed again. There had been comprehension to replace the blind, killing rage, and what she'd seen next was the most dangerous sight she had ever beheld, though she knew not why. Then the door closed, Kelly's eyes shut, and when he opened them, his face was unnaturally serene. The complete sequence had not taken four seconds, she realized, all of it while Rosen and Douglas had been scuffling against the wall. He'd passed from horror to rage to understanding -- then to concealment, but what had come in between comprehension and disguise was the most frightening thing of all.
What had she seen in the face of this man? It took her a moment to answer the question. Death was what she'd seen. Controlled. Planned. Disciplined.
But it was still Death, living in the mind of a man.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Sandy and her community fought against a thing, and fought bravely, risking their sanity in resisting the actions of forces whose root causes they could not directly address. Kelly and his fought against people, leaving the actions of their enemies to others, but able to seek them out and fight directly against their foe, even eliminating them if they were lucky. One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“If the shortest distance to any man’s heart is his stomach, then one of the better compliments a man can give a woman is to ask for seconds.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“the problem with so secure a place was that it depended absolutely on secrecy which, once blown, became a fatal liability”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“What am I supposed to do about you?”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“not a very nice place is it?" rosen asked as they came back for the last load.
"they say there's a hundred different kinds of snake there. ninety-nine are poisonous."
"and the other one?"
kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. "that one eats your ass whole.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Tears released poisons from inside, poisons which if not released could be as deadly as the real kind. The”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“Hmm. Kelly finished off his Coke. That confirmed his suspicion about Oreza’s little visit. So things were getting complicated now, but they’d been pretty complicated the week before, too. He headed off to the bedroom, almost there when there came a knock at the door. That startled him rather badly, but he had to answer it. He’d opened windows to air the apartment out, and it was plain that someone was here. He took a deep breath and opened the door.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“It was realism that told Kelly he couldn’t fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit.”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“no man who could rationalize the death of a child could truly be called a man at all,”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“The dead were gone and didn't know or care what they left behind.. If the dead still lived on the surface of this earth then it was in the minds of those who remembered them... Pg 736”
― Tom Clancy, quote from Without Remorse
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Uljas uusi maailma
“MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011 Port St. Lucie, Florida First impressions are important, and in his first full meeting with us as the Mets manager, Terry Collins makes a really good one. We are in a conference room in Digital Domain Park. Everybody is there—Sandy Alderson, the new general manager, his assistants, the players, the coaches, the trainers, the clubhouse manager, and even our two cooks. We go around the room and introduce ourselves. Sandy speaks first. “The expectations for this club outside of this room are very low,” he says. “I know you guys expect more of yourself, and I expect more of you too.”Sandy is not a rah-rah guy, and his approach is low-key but very compelling. “The goal of any professional sports franchise is to win, and that’s why we’re here.” When he’s done, he turns the floor over to Terry, who says, “Sandy stole my speech.” Everybody laughs. Terry has no notes. He speaks from the heart. I’ve heard a lot of these first-day speeches, and believe me, it’s more common than not for them to seem formulaic, straight off boilerplate. This is not like that at all. Terry is intense, fiery, and enthusiastic. I never get the feeling he is saying things for effect. It seems so authentic, the way he makes contact with everybody in the room and jacks up the decibel level. Even when he dabbles in clichés—“We’re going to do things the right way”—you can’t help but feel his passion and energy. Terry is a small man and doesn’t have an imposing presence when you first see him, but he is powerful nonetheless. The essence of his talk is simple: “Everybody says we’re going to stink. I hear it over and over. I think they’ve got it all wrong. You want to come along as we prove them all wrong?” Terry talks for twenty minutes or so, and by the time he is done, all I can think of is: This is a guy I’m really going to enjoy playing for. CHAPTER THREE FAITH ON WALNUT Some kids are fighters. Other kids are scrappers. I am a scrapper. I spend two extremely scrappy years—fifth and sixth grades—at St. Edward School, and the trend continues into the seventh grade at Wright Middle School, where the kids are bigger and stronger than me, but not too many have less regard for their bodies. I don’t worry about pain or getting hit or getting knocked down. I just get back up and come back at you like a boomerang. My goal when I fight is simple: I want to give more than I receive. This doesn’t make me proud. It’s just what it takes to survive, and in seventh grade survival is what I’m all about. Fights aren’t an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood, but I seem to have more than my share of them. I fight to defend myself, to right a wrong, or to settle a dispute. I’m not picky. I figure out early that in a school where smoke billows out of the bathroom and pregnant girls walk the hallways, you don’t want people thinking you are wimpy. So I learn to act tough when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t need to—which gets me into trouble. In the lunchroom one day, I get up from my seat. You have assigned seats at Wright at lunchtime, and strict rules about leaving them, the school’s effort to prevent the cafeteria from turning into WrestleMania. But I need to get a homework assignment from a classmate, so I get up and walk across the lunchroom. A monitor corrals me and says, Get back to your seat. He’s kind of nasty about it. I don’t appreciate his tone. I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt. Now he doesn’t appreciate my tone. Come with me, young man. You are going to regret your garbage mouth. He’s right—I am going to regret it—because this is Tennessee in the mid-1980s and corporal punishment still rules the day. The monitor escorts me down to see Mr. Tinnon, the assistant principal in charge of paddling. He conveniently keeps the paddle by his desk.”
― quote from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball
“No one could say it was my choice to kill the twins, any more than it was my decision to bring them into the world.”
― John Burnside, quote from The Dumb House
“Judges live with shadows behind them.”
― Jane Gardam, quote from Old Filth
“What?” Kinkajou asked. “What? What? WHAT?”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from Moon Rising
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