Bolin Quotes

Father figures and male authorities hold a sinister interest in controlling girl bodies, and therefore in harming them.

While the sound mixing was underway, Bonzo was on the loose, taking care of buisness his own way. One night he showed up backstage at a Deep Purple concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Bonzo was drunk and in very high spirits, and was wobbling on his feet in the wings when he noticed a free microphone during a lull in the music. Staggering forward, Bonzo walked out onto the stage before the Deep Purple roadies could grab him. The group stopped playing, amazed, as Bonzo grabbed the mike and shouted, 'My name is John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, and I just wanna tell ya that we got a new album comin' out and that it's fuckin' great!!' Then Bonzo turned to leave, but before he went he turned back and gratuitously insulted Deep Purple's guitarist. 'And as far as Tommy Bolin is concerned, he can't play for shit!!

Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes “so paralytically infantile,” as James Baldwin writes in “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” “that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

When a cop kills an unarmed man, it is because he senses his power being threatened by fear that he believes he should never have to feel. When a man kills his ex-girlfriend because she leaves him, he is saying the same thing: shame and sadness are feelings I should not have. Honor killings, as it turns out, are as American as apple pie.

Serial killers and the investigators who look for them both exploit the bodies of vulnerable women.

It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life.

It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery.

Eating disorders are a kind of penance and a kind of fortification and a kind of disguise. It is a paradox of womanhood that women have been so long associated with the private sphere, the home and the family, while our bodies are considered public property.

Our cultural obsession with murder stories and the criminal justice system is a prime example of the impulse to narrativize a reality that is basically unexplainable. For better or worse, narrative is the tool that the system uses to deliver justice: the defense and the prosecution each present their stories, and the one that makes more sense— read as: the more satisfying one— becomes the reality.

learned that there were legions of hopeless women and they could be hurt and hidden so easily.

He is the classic male victim. Even his misogyny is something that was done to him.

these stories— of Over Tumbled Graves, Robert Yates, Ruby Ridge, and all the other northwestern sociopaths— have one thing in common, every step of the way, it’s men. Men are the problem.

But it’s an understandable temptation for investigators to view criminals as mythic opponents, to create a theory of violence that looks at the gun, not at where it’s pointing. Because when you take away the monster, what are you left with?

For “decent” guys, comfortably vested with patriarchal authority, the nightmare is merely to be questioned, to no longer be the narrator of their own story. In Gone Girl, Flynn cracks open the American mainstream and lets Nick say one of our unsayable beliefs: that it is scarier for a man to be accused than to be killed.

En sommar hade de också en kokerska som hade följt med dem från Moskva. Karin trivdes med att vara med henne och tala ryska, en dag frågade hon Karin vad "Abbelentehao" betydde på svenska. Det sa flickorna i köket så ofta när hon serverade dem. Karin hade fått tänka länge, be henne upprepa ordet tills hon förstod att det var : "Jag vill inte ha" på bred skånska.

Do not be slow to answer the Lord’s call! From the passage of the Book of Exodus read to us in this Mass we can learn how the Lord acts in every vocation (cf. Ex 3:1–6, 9–12). First, he provokes a new awareness of his presence—the burning bush. When we begin to show an interest he calls us by name. When our answer becomes more specific and like Moses we say: “Here I am” (cf. v. 4), then he reveals more clearly both himself and his compassionate love for his people in need. Gradually he leads us to discover the practical way in which we should serve him: “I will send you.” And usually it is then that fears and doubts come to disturb us and make it more difficult to decide. It is then that we need to hear the Lord’s assurance: “I am with you” (Ex 3:12). Every vocation is a deep personal experience of the truth of these words: “I am with you.”[153]

Part of the problem is that mental illnesses are not primarily bad feelings, but the thought patterns and compulsions the sufferer develops to deal with them. These are difficult to let go of because, in a limited way, they work. Systems of magical thinking do provide reassurance, even if it takes torturous negotiations with one’s own brain to get there. I sort of agree with Freud that our mental dysfunctions are related to childhood shame, but rather than repressing shameful parts of ourselves, these dysfunctions help us protect them.

While men played at being outlaws with their guns, women played the parts given to them in order to survive.

Like other writers before me, I have tried to make something about women from stories that were always and only about men.

Paige wanted to wipe the smarmy look off the man’s face. A man who’d just admitted to killing Sandra Price and Larry Bolin. And a man who had threatened to kill Dylan if Will told what he saw that night. Which actually

My chief regret is the reserve of fear in us all that prevents us from loving others and being loved as we should. I sometimes imagine that I might live my life again, now that I know what to treasure and what to pass by....But I would endure any trial to preserve my place as Mrs Sherlock Holmes.

Storms do not define us; how we respond does.

Overlooked objects, like the past itself, may divulge the most unexpected finds.

Tobin was a tough guy and we became good friends. I was reading a book about a guy named Mack Bolin who was after the Mob for killing his wife.

Varje påsk lagade min farmor pasjka. Det är en rysk efterrätt som består av kvarg, smör, gräddfil, socker, mandel, äggulor, citron och suckat. Det låg en märklig träställning i ett underskåp i köket hemma i Brommavillan, i den satte man en silduk där kvargen fick rinna av under ett dygn. Jag drogs med i den rituella upphetsningen, det var ju bara en gång om året som den tillagades. Mamma gjorde pasjka för att pappa sa att det hörde till. Och den hade alltid varit ett stående inslag i min farmors familj. När hennes syster Margit, Gaba, låg på sjukhem påsken 1999 kom jag upp på hennes rum när dottern till en rysk vän var där. Hon matade Gaba med något ur en liten plastskål. Det var pasjka, Gaba himlade lyckligt med ögonen och åt. [...] Jag minns min barndoms besvikelse över att det inte smakade så gott. Det var syrligt, kladdigt, ett märkligt mellanting av kräm och kaka. När det landade på tungan fanns en förhoppning om sötma, men syran tog över och som med så mycket annat från pappas barndomskök så mötte jag och min bror pasjkan med den största skepsis.

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

The only way to grow up is to realize that the little tragedies that shock and devastate you are actually universal and inevitable. You are not going to learn that by listening to Taylor Swift or reading Joan Didion, not that I intend to stop doing either.

These stories riff on what has always been sold as the American frontier’s most attractive and most terrifying quality: anything can happen.

In the idealists’ eyes, the Los Angeles of today or yesterday is impermanent, indeterminate, and unimportant. It can always be torn down, rebuilt, and reimagined. I’m collecting examples of a certain L.A. yin-yang: disaster and development, “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” and Play It As It Lays, film language and dream language.

This spiritual equilibrium, a way of thinking much older than Christian ideas of darkness and light, produces all the twinning in these witch stories, women finding their equal and opposite halves: Denver and Sethe, Constance and Merricat.

This was truly stupid, confronting the universe’s randomness by doubling down on my belief that I was its protagonist. I compromised by allowing the story to be a tragedy.

Everyone knows the American West embodies the twin ideals of beauty and terror— the intersection of the awful and the awesome—

The Palouse is the middle of nowhere: a nowhere with quilted hills of wheat and soybeans stacking and cresting like the waves of the ocean. No one is watching, the uncanny countryside seems to say. Anything is possible.

Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes “so paralytically infantile,”as James Baldwin writes in “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,”“that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

Randy Weaver and the FBI agents and U.S. marshals were eventually all Wild West outlaws. Serial killers and the investigators who look for them both exploit the bodies of vulnerable women.

The real disease is that authorities prefer the banally evil Yates to the twenty-year-old gangbangers, the drug-addicted prostitutes. It’s like we’re back in an Old West settlement: with the prospectors, the robbers, the mountain men, the outlaws, the sheriff with his shiny badge, the judge far off in his courthouse. There are women at the brothel and the saloon, rumors of Indians hiding in the hills, but I’m not fooled. Even creekside with the earth folding itself into stark foothills, forest and mountain crags announcing the distance—even amid the anarchy, I know who’s in charge.

The woods are shadowy, uncertain places, sympathetic to secrets, magic, transformations, and cruelty. Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition— it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.

our most basic myth would seem to be not Oedipus’s patricide, but matricide and violence against women. Where is Cinderella’s mother, and where is Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? The philosopher Julia Kristeva has explained the drive toward matricide as a kind of original, generative anger, expressing a need to destroy the mother, the origin place, to become an individual self. This is messier than an Oedipal reading of history, as the will to matricide is born in confusion and creates only chaos. As Nelson explains, the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.

The white girl becomes the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr, particularly to that most unholy idol of narrative.