Ashley Banks Quotes

Seriously, I don’t care if feminists hunt me down and burn me at the stake, that man crooked his finger at me, I’d follow him into a bank and rob it at his side.

If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for." Banks tells me. "But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, I'm not surprised she's dead. A job, husband, kids, a beach house? That wasn't her. I can't explain why, except she was more like a force that whipped through life, defying logic, scaring you, even hurting you because she was everything you wanted to be, but you knew you'd never have the guts - and then she was gone. That was my experience with Ashley Cordova.

He gives me a kiss that barely touches my lips – it means nothing or everything. After he’s gone, I think, Happy birthday to me. Jack says, ‘That was the guy?’ ‘That was him.’ Jake shakes his head. ‘What?’ ‘He’s not for you,’ he says. I say, ‘How do you know?’ but what I mean is, How do you know? ‘He’s like Ashley Wilkes,’ he says. ‘Any one of these guys is Rhett-ier than he is.’ Again, I ask my benignly inflected, ‘How do you know?’ ‘How do I know?’ he says, tackling me into a bear hug. ‘How do I know? I know, that’s how I know.

Ever since I married Bob thirty years ago, Elliott’s used us like a bank. He wouldn’t call for months on end, and when he did, he’d pretend it was to catch up. But then, inevitably, he’d work into the conversation how broke he was and how he needed money for this or that. Bob always told me I was too soft, that I gave in too easy, but—

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula. I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael’s calling cadence in the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street. Deep in my bones, I knew early that I was one of those incorrigible creatures known as Charlestonians. It comes to me as a surprising form of knowledge that my time in the city is more vocation than gift; it is my destiny, not my choice. I consider it a high privilege to be a native of one of the loveliest American cities, not a high-kicking, glossy, or lipsticked city, not a city with bells on its fingers or brightly painted toenails, but a ruffled, low-slung city, understated and tolerant of nothing mismade or ostentatious. Though Charleston feels a seersuckered, tuxedoed view of itself, it approves of restraint far more than vainglory. As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metalwork as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

Esther Lee, Tom Hughes, Anya Hayden and Ashley Heyer for their work on this book. Finally, I appreciate the patience and guidance extended to me by my contacts at Elsevier, especially Scott Bentley,

With the downtown of Fort Wayne nearly abandoned, my mother would weave the car down one-way streets heading west, then east, featuring display after display of historical holiday cheer. Our official tour began at the bread factory, where a mechanical wheel of never-ending sliced bread actually never stopped slicing, and the smell of hot flour, sugar, and yeast entwined itself with Christmas. The factory would be decorated with blinking lights cascading from just below the perpetually spinning bread wheel, to what I assumed was the ground beneath us. We'd pass Santa and his reindeer, bigger than life and all lit up on the side of PNC Bank, and he would wink at me. I knew it was a trick of the light, but I winked back just in case the real Santa might know that I didn't. The drive was nearly over when we got to the bright green wreath on the plaza, but this was also the spot where my mom would park and let us out. All three of us would jump towards the wreath that was mounted much too high for any person to read. We didn't think we could reach it either but that didn't stop us from trying.

because of it being a bank holiday.

see, the corruption would reach all the way to the office of the vice president of the United States and soon contributed to a cascade of bank failures: 117 in Florida and Georgia in one ten-day period in late 1926. In fact, according to banking historian Raymond B. Vickers, 90 percent of the Florida banks that failed were guilty of self-dealing or outright fraud by insiders. Vickers, who studied bank records from the period that had been sealed for sixty-three years, concluded: “The sad story told by these records is that insiders looted the banks they pledged to protect. They tried to get rich by wildly speculating with depositors’ money, and when their schemes failed, so did their banks.” So, one didn’t need to belong to the Ashley gang to rob a Florida bank in the 1920s. There were white-collar methods of theft that were equally effective and far less likely to be detected or prosecuted.