Bullet Train Quotes

A bullet from a gun does not make a distinction between practice and combat. You are training to be one and the same way in your life

You could love the sleek, efficient beauty of a brand-new bullet train, but only a fool could imagine it would love you back.

Like building muscle, we need to train our intentions to make them resilient and strong.

Fire would barrel along that chain like a bullet train, he knew. It surged and jumped and gorged itself. It raced like an animal. It ravaged with inhuman efficiency.

Often the case with people who don't read fiction. Hollow inside, monochrome, so they can switch gears no problem. They swallow something and forget about it as soon as it goes down their throat. Constitutionally incapable of empathy. These are people who most need to read, but in most cases it's already too late.

I have traveled around the world. I’ve walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That’s not all. I’ve led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I’ve lived a thousand lives. Too bad the only real one fucking sucks.

The tortured mind is a worse fate than a bullet in the train.

Easy come, easy go, That's just how you live, oh, Take, take, take it all, But you never give. Should've known you was trouble From the first kiss, Had your eyes wide open. Why were they open? Gave you all I had and you tossed it in the trash, You tossed it in the trash, you did. To give me all your love is all I ever asked, 'cause What you don't understand is I'd catch a grenade for ya Throw my hand on a blade for ya I'd jump in front of a train for ya You know I'd do anything for ya Oh, oh, I would go through all of this pain, Take a bullet straight through my brain! Yes, I would die for ya, baby, But you won't do the same.

Tell me what to do, not how to do it.' Decentralize command and allow subordinates to operate freely within the framework of the commander's intent. Train them as a team. Develop trust, loyalty, initiative.

She'd been trained to survive many things: starvation and bullet wounds. Winter nights and scouring sun. Double-tied knots and interrogations at knifepoint. But this? A boy's lips on hers. Moving and melding. Soft and strength, velvet and iron. Opposite elements that tugged and tor Yael from the inside. Feelings bloomed, hot and warm. Deep and dark.

A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession — that’s what I was trained to do.

Olson sat up. He put his hands against his belly and stared calmly at the poised soldiers on the deck of the squat vehicle. the soldiers stared back. 'You bastards!' McVries sobbed. 'You bloody bastards!' Olson began to get up. Another volley of bullets drove him flat again. Now there was a sound from behind Garraty. He didn't have to turn his head to know it was Stebbins. Stebbins was laughing softly. Olson sat up again. The guns were still trained on him, but the soldiers did not shoot. Their silhouettes on the halftrack seemed almost to indicate curiosity. Slowly, reflectively, Olson gained his feet, hands crossed on his belly. He seemed to sniff the air for direction, turned slowly in the direction of the Walk, and began to stagger along.

Safety is paramount.” “If safety were paramount,” Whitmer declared, “we’d stay in the barracks and play pickup basketball. Good training is paramount.

Reporters. Honestly. What an exhausting profession, to be professionally trained to be relentless.

I fell in love with a sniper - a man whose basic training instills psychopathic tendencies. I loved a professional dehumanizer. I loved a man who lived in a world where empathy was suicide. I loved a man who had to be ready to put a bullet through a toddler’s skull if necessary. I loved a man highly skilled in burying his emotions, resurrecting them if and when he chose. I loved a man who saw me as his enemy. I loved a man I was disposable to.

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage might work: Because you wear pink but write poems about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol, gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents of what you packed were written inside the boxes. Because you think swans are overrated. Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence. Because you underline everything you read, and circle the things you think are important, and put stars next to the things you think I should think are important, and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there. Because you make that pork recipe you found in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed over the windows, you still believe someone outside can see you. And one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments— there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

It's a line from one of the characters in the novel. It means that everyone dies, and they're alone when they do.' Lemon sneers. 'I'm not gonna die.' 'You'll die, and you'll die alone.' 'Even if I do die, I'll come back.' 'Yeah, it's like you to be so stubborn. But I'm going to die someday. Alone.

The breeze carried the music into the distant country plains, past the bullet trains, across the majestic cornfields and the Christmas tree farms. The music swept past the Georgia orange trees, the droning honeybees, and the shining seas of the Atlantic. It wafted past the London Pier. Young Britney wanted all of Nod to hear.

For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine's story is, surprisingly, little known today.

My buddy Thomas helped me survive.

Marine training is essentially a psychological battle against the instinct for self-preservation.

I rushed through the patio of an abandoned Au Bon Pain restaurant and paused just long enough to take hold of one of the metal tables crowding the patio space. One thing you learn in explosives training with the Secret Service is that glass can kill you just as easily as bullets can.

Suicide by train is also popular in many developed countries. Without ready access to firearms, suicidal people often turn to trains. —Der Spiegel, July 27, 2011 Once it happens you can’t remember how you started out: innocent, barreling into the tunnel, shooting out at each station like a dolphin out of a dim green pool. Pneumatic doors inhale open, puff shut, lock with a solid thump. Up and down the line, fifty times a day, it’s a long slow song. You feel the rumble as much as hear it. In your dim green trance the words retain wonder: Vorsicht, Türe werden geschloßen. Caution, the doors are closing. Then the first time: someone decides darkness will answer, hides out in the tunnel, steps out in front of the train like he knows where he’s going, steps out at you, dying at you, knowing you can’t stop in time. Now each time the doors close, they seal you in. You are a human bullet shot into the tunnels, hoping no one will block the light far ahead, each station one minute’s reprieve.

Nanao can’t escape this thought: if it happened once it can happen again, and if it happened twice it can happen three times, and if three times then four, so we might as well say that if something happens once it’ll keep happening forever.

The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I’d drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.

the bridge and across the water we go, and I transfer to the bullet train at Okayama Station. I sink back in my seat and close my eyes. My body gradually adjusts to the train’s vibration. The tightly wrapped painting of Kafka on the Shore is at my feet. I can feel it there.

I hear a swelling swoosh; from the south a bullet train whizzes into view on the tracks, knives through the landscape in a matter of moments, then disappears with a whoosh. It has just covered in a few seconds what has taken me hours to walk. That very fast train reminds me that, as a pilgrim, travel is made holy in its slowness. I see things that neither the passengers of the train nor the drivers of the automobiles see. I feel things that they will never feel. I have time to ponder, imagine, daydream. I tire. I thirst. In my slow walking, I find me.

I spent the whole bullet-train ride mentally reviewing my eighteen years and realised that almost everything that had happened to me was pretty embarrassing. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it - it was so pathetic. The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself.

KIMURA Tokyo Station is packed. It’s been a while since Yuichi Kimura was here last, so he isn’t sure if it’s always this crowded. He’d believe it if someone told him there was a special event going on. The throngs of people coming and going press in on him, reminding him of the TV show he and Wataru had watched together, the one about penguins, all jammed in tight together. At least the penguins have an excuse, thinks Kimura. It’s freezing where they live. He waits for an opening in the stream of people, cuts between the souvenir shops and kiosks, quickening his pace. Up a short flight of stairs to the turnstile for the Shinkansen high-speed bullet train. As he passes through the automated ticketing gate

We spent so much time together. But at the end, we’re all alone.

Real bullets are for keeps, and concealment is not necessarily good cover.

....I'd rather travel in Cargo-nanoships than a Bullet-train to reach my target.

As any athlete will tell you, you need to tear muscle to build it, over and over again. Like building muscle, we need to train our intentions to make them resilient and strong.

Like a fighter pilot that goes full throttle, Like a bullet train that wants to lead, Like an inspiring game of spin the bottle, I desired creativity and its unique speed. Like a lady who walks with dignity and pride, Like a gentleman who stands by justice and truth, Like a loose cannon with a constructive attitude, I treasured the power of gratitude.

We all are passengers to a train called life, the duration & destination to which is pre-planned.

Tangerine feels his chest split open and shatter into small pieces. A cold wind gusts into the hole in his heart. He realizes he's never felt this before, which leaves him even more shaken.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly – yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” – “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” – “Don’t argue, obey!” – “Don’t try to understand, believe!” – “Don’t struggle, compromise!” – “Your heart is more important than your mind!” – “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” – “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” – “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” – “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!” Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival – yet that was what they did to their children.

Ihave traveled around the world. I’ve walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That’s not all. I’ve led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I’ve lived a thousand lives.

In December 1981, the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion began its systemic execution of over 750 civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, including hundreds of children under the age of 12. The soldiers were thorough and left only one survivor. At first they stabbed and decapitated their victims, but they turned to machine guns when the hacking grew too tiresome (a decade later, an exhumation team digging through the mass graves found hundreds of bullets with head stamps indicating that the ammunition was manufactured in Lake City, Missouri, for the U.S. government).

Your feet know more about the forest than that government lawyer. Your toes know more about the forest than all of Civilization.” She nodded, unmoved by the thought, kept her eyes trained on the courtroom. She knew that already. When she was a young girl, on the trek with my father to the missionary village, she was bitten by a pit viper. The venom had coursed through her toes, up her ankles, her legs. Her feet had stepped on uncountable roots, seeds, leaves, mushrooms, thorns and been bitten by bullet ants and mosquitos, stung by wasps and scorpions and stingrays, dusted by tarantulas, burned by caterpillar hairs. Her feet could press into a garden’s soil and tell her when it was time to plant and when it was time to burn. Her toes could distinguish between the bark of cedar and mahogany, of peach palm and cinnamon, of kapok and guava.

Raindrops the size of bullets thundered on the castle windows for days on end; the lake rose, the flowerbeds turned into muddy streams and Hagrid's pumpkins swelled to the size of garden sheds. Oliver Wood's enthusiasm for regular training sessions, however, was not dampened, which was why Harry was to be found, late one stormy Saturday afternoon a few days before Hallowe'en, returning to the Gryffindor Tower, drenched to the skin and splattered with mud.

Put me on a train with no windows where nighttime lasts forever and a speed-mad engineer with a mechanical heart high balls a coal-black engine through time tunnels like a bullet leaving a gun where the speed of darkness is faster than the speed of light.

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker’s more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you. In short when a Peacemaker’s bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don’t curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh. Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operator’s table, was the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadn’t varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins.

Zombie nerds. They probably had the flyers already made up for this. There was nobody creepier than the zombie nerds, college guys who not only watched zombie movies and read zombie novels and played zombie video games, but actually formed clubs and collected zombie-killing weapons. Gun shops around there actually stocked zombie targets, and special zombie bullets with glow-in-the-dark tips. Not toy bullets, mind you. These guys would go out in the woods and train and shoot and defend to the death their right to stay in childhood until age thirty-five.

That was the first time in my life that anyone had rejected me so completely.' Tsukuru said. 'And the ones who did it were the people I trusted the most, my four best friends in the world. I was so close to them that they had been like an extension of my own body. Searching for the reason, or correcting a misunderstanding, was beyond me. I was simply, and utterly, in shock. So much so that I thought I might never recover. It felt like something inside me snapped.' The bartender brought over the glass of wine and replenished the bowl of nuts. Once he'd left, Sara turned to Tsukuru. 'I've never experienced that myself, but I think I can imagine how stunned you must have been. I understand that you couldn't recover from it quickly. But still, after time had passed and the shock had worn off, wasn't there something you could have done? I mean, it was so unfair. Why didn't you challenge it? I don't see how you could stand it.' Tsukuru shook his head slightly. 'The next morning I made up some excuse to tell my family and took the bullet train back to Tokyo. I couldn't stand being in Nagoya for one more day. All I could think of was getting away from there.' 'If it had been me, I would have stayed there and not left until I got to the bottom of it,' Sara said. 'I wasn't strong enough for that.' Tsukuru said. 'You didn't want to find out the truth?' Tsukuru stared at his hands on the tabletop, careful choosing his words. 'I think I was afraid of pursuing it, of whatever facts might come of light. Of actually coming face-to-face with them. Whatever the truth was, I didn't think it would save me. I'm not sure why, but I was certain of it.' 'And you're certain of it now?' 'I don't know,' Tsukuru said. 'But I was then.' 'So you went back to Tokyo, stayed holed up in your apartment, closed your eyes, and covered up your ears.' 'You could say that, yes.

Probably nothing going on inside', thinks Tangerine. Often the case with people who don’t read fiction. Hollow inside, monochrome, so they can switch gears no problem. They swallow something and forget about it as soon as it good down their throats. Constitutionally incapable of empathy. These are the people who most need to read, but in most cases it’s too late.

Probably nothing going on inside, thinks Tangerine. Often the case with people who don’t read fiction. Hollow inside, monochrome, so they can switch gears no problem. They swallow something and forget about it as soon as it goes down their throat. Constitutionally incapable of empathy. These are the people who most need to read, but in most cases it’s already too late.

People act based on the influence of those around them. Human beings aren’t primarily motivated by reason but by instinct. So even when it looks like someone is acting up their own individual will , they’re always taking input from other people. They might think they have an independent, original existence, but once you put them on a graph they’re just another data point . - The Prince

The train, I was later told by my mother, only had about ten carriages to it, and there were hundreds of people fighting to get on. I don’t think anybody knew where the train was going, only that it was leaving Strausberg and would take us away from the Russians, who were now arriving on the far end of the platform. Some German SS soldiers and Police were shooting at the Russian troops, and many people – men, women and children – were hit by the flying bullets.

But she was not prepared to understand me. And so we parted. Thinking about all the things that made her so much nicer than the other girls at home, I sat on the bullet train to Tokyo feeling terrible about what I'd done, but there was no way to undo it. I would try to forget her. There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green baize pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium chimneys, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life

With her eye still in the scope, Zoya Zakharova pulled the charging handle back on the VSS rifle, chambering a 9-by-39-millimeter round. She hadn’t envisioned using the weapon this evening at all, and she hadn’t fired a VSS since her sniper training four years earlier, but she had a target downrange now, and she was committed to killing him. She followed the man’s head with the crosshairs of the rifle, holding just a touch high to account for the characteristics of this bullet at this distance

The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passers-by. Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn’t a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes for no very good reason. In 1880, after years on the run, Kelly was reported to be holed up with his modest gang (a brother and two friends) in Glenrowan, a hamlet in the foothills of the Warby Range in north-eastern Victoria. Learning of this, the police assembled a large posse and set off to get him. As surprise attacks go, it wasn’t terribly impressive. When the police arrived (on an afternoon train) they found that word of their coming had preceded them and that a thousand people were lined up along the streets and sitting on every rooftop eagerly awaiting the spectacle of gunfire. The police took up positions and at once began peppering the Kelly hideout with bullets. The Kellys returned the fire and so it went throughout the night. The next dawn during a lull Kelly stepped from the dwelling, dressed unexpectedly, not to say bizarrely, in a suit of home-made armour – a heavy cylindrical helmet that brought to mind an inverted bucket, and a breastplate that covered his torso and crotch. He wore no armour on his lower body, so one of the policemen shot him in the leg. Aggrieved, Kelly staggered off into some nearby woods, fell over and was captured. He was taken to Melbourne, tried and swiftly executed. His last words were: ‘Such is life.

His fury peaked in that moment. He refused to die because of something so random, without cause or purpose. He had to know the reason. There had to be an answer to it. He would not die now, ended by a bullet from a nameless assassin. He saw the killer shift his stance, moving to line up his shot. He was heavy-set and broad across the shoulders, easily Marc’s superior in terms of muscle and power, even without the matter of the semi-automatic pistol in his hand. He didn’t have a plan. There wasn’t any training he had gone through for a scenario such as this one. But he had no other choice

The report was so loud Nicholas thought the guard had fired into his head. He staggered as the man’s grip fell away, his hand going to his cheek. He felt the warm wetness of blood, but it wasn’t his. He looked for the Gardier and saw him sprawled on the ground, one neat bullet hole in his forehead. He straightened up, reaching for a handkerchief until he remembered the damn uniform jacket had no pockets. Wiping the blood away with his hand, he said under his breath, “I knew emphasizing firearms training over deportment lessons would benefit in the long run.” His daughter moved toward him, lowering the pistol, staring.

This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, were short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words—goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joy camp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others—were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further. So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised.

I'm living in a horror movie, all right. Only the horror doesn't have anything to do with necrophilia or black masses or crosses hung upside down, or with vampires who can't swim or zombies who work in sugar cane fields and can't stop shambling off cliffs when some guy with a jawbreaker accent says so, No, this is real life. It was running out all around him. the footprints of assassins and neo-fascists and government officials with secret closets full of tutus, private armies training in ships named after the wives of oilmen, of drunken presidents in bed with the mob and the cartels that slice up the world and stick FOR SALE signs on the pieces; while the real kings of earth lie moldering in their graves, their brains stolen away in the night and their bullet wounds altered to match storybook plots that would be laughed out of any preschool classroom. And all this while the billions sweat and grow old like the living dead, their lifeblood sucked dry by the takers of souls who need our labor to feed a hunger for power without end. The undead? What a cheapjack explanation for so much misery. There is more than enough to account for it all without falling back on the unnameable. It's already here. The trick is to see it and not flinch- there's no future in denial. It's as simple, and as enormous, as that. The truth, however bleak, was almost comforting.

For possession of a single bullet, Shaykh Farhan al-Sa‘di, an eighty-one-year-old rebel leader, was put to death in 1937. Under the martial law in force at the time, that single bullet was sufficient to merit capital punishment, particularly for an accomplished guerrilla fighter like al-Sa‘di.57 Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops.58 Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921.

I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.

Unwashed and undernourished, having spent over four days on five different trains and four military jeeps, Alexander got off at Molotov on Friday, June 19, 1942. He arrived at noon and then sat on a wooden bench near the station. Alexander couldn’t bring himself to walk to Lazarevo. He could not bear the thought of her dying in Kobona, getting out of the collapsed city and then dying so close to salvation. He could not face it. And worse—he knew that he could not face himself if he found out that she did not make it. He could not face returning—returning to what? Alexander actually thought of getting on the next train and going back immediately. The courage to move forward was much more than the courage he needed to stand behind a Katyusha rocket launcher or a Zenith antiaircraft gun on Lake Ladoga and know that any of the Luftwaffe planes flying overhead could instantly bring about his death. He was not afraid of his own death. He was afraid of hers. The specter of her death took away his courage. If Tatiana was dead, it meant God was dead, and Alexander knew he could not survive an instant during war in a universe governed by chaos, not purpose. He would not live any longer than poor, hapless Grinkov, who had been cut down by a stray bullet as he headed back to the rear. War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war. But Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo. For two hours Alexander sat on the bench in unpaved, provincial, oak-lined Molotov. To go back was impossible. To go forward was unthinkable. Yet he had nowhere else to go. He crossed himself and stood up, gathering his belongings. When Alexander finally walked in the direction of Lazarevo, not knowing whether Tatiana was alive or dead, he felt he was a man walking to his own execution.

The physical technique is important,” I say. “But it’s mostly a mental game, which is lucky for you, because you know how to play those. You don’t just practice the shooting, you also practice the focus. And then, when you’re in a situation where you’re fighting for your life, the focus will be so ingrained that it will happen naturally.” “I didn’t know the Dauntless were so interested in training the brain,” Caleb says. “Can I see you try it, Tris? I don’t think I’ve ever really seen you shoot something without a bullet wound in your shoulder.” Tris smiles a little and faces the target. When I first saw her shoot during Dauntless training, she looked awkward, birdlike. But her thin, fragile form has become slim but muscular, and when she holds the gun, it looks easy. She squints one eye a little, shifts her weight, and fires. Her bullet strays from the target’s center, but only by inches. Obviously impressed, Caleb raises his eyebrows. “Don’t look so surprised!” Tris says. “Sorry,” he says. “I just…you used to be so clumsy, remember? I don’t know how I missed that you weren’t like that anymore.” Tris shrugs, but when she looks away, her cheeks are flushed and she looks pleased. Christina shoots again, and this time hits the target closer to the middle. I step back to let Caleb practice, and watch Tris fire again, watch the straight lines of her body as she lifts the gun, and how steady she is when it goes off. I touch her shoulder and lean in close to her ear. “Remember during training, how the gun almost hit you in the face?” She nods, smirking. “Remember during training, when I did this?” I say, and I reach around her to press my hand to her stomach. She sucks in a breath. “I’m not likely to forget that anytime soon,” she mutters. She twists around and draws my face toward hers, her fingertips on my chin. We kiss, and I hear Christina say something about it, but for the first time, I don’t care at all.

Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.

A stranger. Young, well-dressed, pale and visibly sweaty, as if he’d endured some great shock and needed a drink. West would have been tempted to pour him one, if not for the fact that he’d just pulled a small revolver from his pocket and was pointing it in his direction. The nose of the short barrel was shaking. Commotion erupted all around them as patrons became aware of the drawn pistol. Tables and chairs were vacated, and shouts could be heard among the growing uproar. “You self-serving bastard,” the stranger said unsteadily. “That could be either of us,” Severin remarked with a slight frown, setting down his drink. “Which one of us do you want to shoot?” The man didn’t seem to hear the question, his attention focused only on West. “You turned her against me, you lying, manipulative snake.” “It’s you, apparently,” Severin said to West. “Who is he? Did you sleep with his wife?” “I don’t know,” West said sullenly, knowing he should be frightened of an unhinged man aiming a pistol at him. But it took too much energy to care. “You forgot to cock the hammer,” he told the man, who immediately pulled it back. “Don’t encourage him, Ravenel,” Severin said. “We don’t know how good a shot he is. He might hit me by mistake.” He left his chair and began to approach the man, who stood a few feet away. “Who are you?” he asked. When there was no reply, he persisted, “Pardon? Your name, please?” “Edward Larson,” the young man snapped. “Stay back. If I’m to be hanged for shooting one of you, I’ll have nothing to lose by shooting both of you.” West stared at him intently. The devil knew how Larson had found him there, but clearly he was in a state. Probably in worse condition than anyone in the club except for West. He was clean-cut, boyishly handsome, and looked like he was probably very nice when he wasn’t half-crazed. There could be no doubt as to what had made him so wretched—he knew his wrongdoings had been exposed, and that he’d lost any hope of a future with Phoebe. Poor bastard. Picking up his glass, West muttered, “Go on and shoot.” Severin continued speaking to the distraught man. “My good fellow, no one could blame you for wanting to shoot Ravenel. Even I, his best friend, have been tempted to put an end to him on a multitude of occasions.” “You’re not my best friend,” West said, after taking a swallow of brandy. “You’re not even my third best friend.” “However,” Severin continued, his gaze trained on Larson’s gleaming face, “the momentary satisfaction of killing a Ravenel—although considerable—wouldn’t be worth prison and public hanging. It’s far better to let him live and watch him suffer. Look how miserable he is right now. Doesn’t that make you feel better about your own circumstances? I know it does me.” “Stop talking,” Larson snapped. As Severin had intended, Larson was distracted long enough for another man to come up behind him unnoticed. In a deft and well-practiced move, the man smoothly hooked an arm around Larson’s neck, grasped his wrist, and pushed the hand with the gun toward the floor. Even before West had a good look at the newcomer’s face, he recognized the smooth, dry voice with its cut-crystal tones, so elegantly commanding it could have belonged to the devil himself. “Finger off the trigger, Larson. Now.” It was Sebastian, the Duke of Kingston . . . Phoebe’s father. West lowered his forehead to the table and rested it there, while his inner demons all hastened to inform him they really would have preferred the bullet.

Electricity and the lightbulb we invented without bullet journals. New modes of transportation like the locomotive train…were created without New Year’s resolutions. It makes me feel bad for Alexander Hamilton or Mozart–if only they would’ve known about goal setting.

glanced around the tree to get a good look at the vehicle. “That’s one of Hassanzai’s men from the warehouse.”  The passenger door opened and one of the men got out and eased toward their wrecked car with his weapon trained. She recognized him—the Caucasian man she’d seen at the warehouse.   “We should keep moving, Kaiden.” They headed deeper into the woods while Sidney pushed branches out of their way, her injured wrist throbbing with pain. “There’s no one here,” the Caucasian man standing near their car shouted to the driver. He spoke in the Afghanistan language of Pashto. Shock ripples charged through Sidney’s body. Who was this man? “Let’s find them.”  Where was their backup? Sidney tried to shut off her troubled thoughts and keep up the fast pace. They couldn’t be captured.  “Up ahead. I see them!” the same man yelled. Seconds later, a bombardment of bullets whizzed past their heads. Sidney hit the ground next to Kaiden. Both returned fire, forcing the man to retreat.  “Others will be coming. We have to get out of here. Now.” A second man announced with a thick accent. The man who fired on them didn’t budge. His partner turned and headed back toward their vehicle. After another second’s hesitation, he followed.  “We can’t let them get away,” Sidney said. “There’s a chance we might be able to convince them to talk.” She slipped from behind the tree coverage and aimed at the fleeing men. “Stop right there.” Both men whirled with weapons drawn. Kaiden opened fire forcing them to dive for cover. “Drop your guns,” Sidney ordered. “Put your hands in the air.” One of the men’s weapons peeked out

Let me amend that. Of course I’m sure it was done. Every generation likes to think that they discovered sex, but I’m sure that far more sophisticated people than me were experiencing cunnilingus in 1940, all over New York City—especially in the Village. But I’d never heard of it. God knows, I’d had everything else done to the flower of my femininity that summer, but not this. I’d been palmed and rubbed and penetrated, and certainly fingered and probed (my heavens, how the boys liked to poke about, and so vigorously, too)—but never this. His mouth had ended up between my legs so fast, and the sudden realization of his destination and his intent had shocked me to the point that I said “Oh!” and started to sit up, but he reached up one of his long arms, placed his palm on my chest, and firmly pressed me back down again, without once stopping what he was doing. “Oh!” I said again. Then I felt it. There was a sensation occurring here that I didn’t even know could occur. I took the sharpest inhale of my life, and I’m not sure I let my breath out for another ten minutes. I do feel that I lost the ability to see and hear for a while, and that something might have short-circuited in my brain—something that has probably never been fully fixed since. My whole being was astonished. I could hear myself making noises like an animal, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably (not that I was trying to control them), and my hands were gripping down so hard over my face that I left fingernail divots in my own skull. Then it became more. And after that, it became even more still. Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet. And then it was the most, and I more or less died.

I have traveled around the world. I've walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That's not all. I've led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I've lived a thousand lives. Too bad the only real one fucking sucks.

Brooklyn’s pregnant,” I lash back. “You trained her yourself too.” “Want me to stick a fucking baby in you? I’ll do it right here. At least then I’ll have a reason to lock your ass down, safe at home.” “So romantic.” “It could be,” he combats. “We can hear everything you’re saying,” Theo hisses into our earpieces. “Threaten to impregnate Harlow again and I’ll be forced to crash a ten-thousand-pound drone into your head.” “And be thankful my brother is deaf, or you wouldn’t live long enough to put a bullet in our target,” Leighton adds cheerfully. “No impregnations today, then,” I surmise.

People need to find a way to justify themselves. A person can’t live without being able to tell themselves that they’re right, that they’re strong, that they have value. So when their words and actions diverge from their view of themselves, they start looking for excuses, to help reconcile the contradiction.

Being forced to submit to someone else’s will is the same. It makes people try to justify themselves. In order to avoid acknowledging one’s impotence, one’s abject weakness, people try to find some reason. They think, this person must be something really special to beat me so thoroughly. Or, anyone would be powerless in this situation. This gives some small satisfaction. The more confidence and self-regard someone has, the more they need to tell themselves something like this. And once they do, the power relations are set in stone. Then all you have to do is say two or three things that stroke the person’s ego and they’ll do whatever you tell them.

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy’s mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler’s caution, who had obeyed with a zealot’s fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal. He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!”—“Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!”—“Don’t argue, obey!”—“Don’t try to understand, believe!”—“Don’t rebel, adjust!”—“Don’t stand out, belong!”—“Don’t struggle, compromise!”—“Your heart is more important than your mind!”—“Who are you to know? Your parents know best!”—“Who are you to know? Society knows best!” “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!”—“Who are you to object? All values are relative!”—“Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!

I have traveled around the world. I’ve walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That’s not all. I’ve led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I’ve lived a thousand lives. Too bad the only real one fucking sucks. I sigh and close the book I’ve been reading. It’s a good one, about a ghost hunter who accidentally falls in love with the spirit she’s supposed to track down. Some people call these guilty pleasure reads, but why should I feel guilt for wanting to escape to somewhere else, even for a little while?

political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

For all its bullet trains and modern architecture and K-pop styles, South Korea is still a very conservative country with old-fashioned notions of female virtue.

Ethan left Seattle overjoyed by the celebration and unity he’d felt in the streets, but also disillusioned with the results. For all the careful organizing, the movement needed more training in nonviolence. “People were singing for peace,” he said. “But once the rubber bullets and concussion grenades started, they were hurling concrete at the police.” The protests reinforced the chasm between citizens and cops, perpetuating the model of a police state. Reporters had deepened the divide, focusing on the masked vandals instead of the elderly Quaker

Ihave traveled around the world. I’ve walked the Great Wall of China, eaten dinner at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and ridden the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka. That’s not all. I’ve led an army into battle on dragonback, seduced a vicious mafia boss, and journeyed back in time to fall in love with everyone from Vikings to the Knights of the Round Table. I’ve lived a thousand lives. Too bad the only real one fucking sucks.

Today, as provost of Harvard University, Steve Hyman is mostly engaged in the many political and administrative tasks that come with leading a large institution. But he is a neuroscientist by training, and in 1996 to 2001, when he was the director of the NIMH, he wrote a paper, one both memorable and provocative in kind, that summed up all that had been learned about psychiatric drugs. Titled “Initiation and Adaptation: A Paradigm for Understanding Psychotropic Drug Action,” it was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and it told of how all psychotropic drugs could be understood to act on the brain in a common way.46 Antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other psychotropic drugs, he wrote, “create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” In response, the brain goes through a series of compensatory adaptations. If a drug blocks a neurotransmitter (as an antipsychotic does), the presynaptic neurons spring into hyper gear and release more of it, and the postsynaptic neurons increase the density of their receptors for that chemical messenger. Conversely, if a drug increases the synaptic levels of a neurotransmitter (as an antidepressant does), it provokes the opposite response: The presynaptic neurons decrease their firing rates and the postsynaptic neurons decrease the density of their receptors for the neurotransmitter. In each instance, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects. “These adaptations,” Hyman explained, “are rooted in homeostatic mechanisms that exist, presumably, to permit cells to maintain their equilibrium in the face of alterations in the environment or changes in the internal milieu.” However, after a period of time, these compensatory mechanisms break down. The “chronic administration” of the drug then causes “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function,” Hyman wrote. As part of this long-term adaptation process, there are changes in intracellular signaling pathways and gene expression. After a few weeks, he concluded, the person’s brain is functioning in a manner that is “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” His was an elegant paper, and it summed up what had been learned from decades of impressive scientific work. Forty years earlier, when Thorazine and the other first-generation psychiatric drugs were discovered, scientists had little understanding of how neurons communicated with one another. Now they had a remarkably detailed understanding of neurotransmitter systems in the brain and of how drugs acted on them. And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

If you don't look up from time to time life will fly by like a bullet train

There’s no ultimate manstopper, (Except for maybe a nuke.) Shot placement is the most important. The mob killed more people with .22 caliber bullets than any other. Fear is natural, embrace it, and learn to use it to your own advantage. Being fearless means you’re stupid. The more combat someone has seen, the less they talk about it. Courage is the first requirement of success in a crisis. Even a rugged, fully redundant, satellite enhanced, broadband, multimillion dollar tactical communications system will break down when you need it the most. Learn how to make decisions and carry out the plan without comms. A sense of humor will get you through anything from a gunshot wound to a divorce. Being alert will prevent 99% of the problems. Do unto others as they would do unto you; just make sure you do it first. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. If you fight, don’t be fair. If you know it all—you don’t. The first rule of a knife fight, is don’t get into a knife fight. The best defense to a knife fight is a full large capacity magazine used before the knife wielding person comes close enough to use their knife. Anything and everything can and WILL fail at the worst possible moment. If you don’t practice a movement at least 500 times, you’ll never do it under stress. You’ll never wake up knowing today is the day, so don’t sweat it. Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfectly practicing makes perfect. Our enemy is frequently smarter than we give them credit for. Train yourself to relax after the fight. We go into battle with what we have on our backs. The human mind is the deadliest weapon ever invented.

Readers of this book, having come this far in the text, cannot be surprised to learn that outcomes for bipolar disorder have dramatically worsened in the pharmacotherapy era. The only surprising thing is that this failure was so openly discussed at the APA meeting. Given what the scientific literature revealed about the long-term outcomes of medicated schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression, it stood to reason that the drug cocktails used to treat bipolar illness were not going to produce good long-term results. The increased chronicity, the functional decline, the cognitive impairment, and the physical illness—all of these can be expected to show up in people treated with a cocktail that often includes an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, a benzodiazepine, and perhaps a stimulant, too. This was a medical train wreck that could have been anticipated, and unfortunately, as we trace the history of this story, the details will seem all too familiar.

Briony dips out from beneath Saint’s stance, grabbing another blade from inside her high-heeled boot, sending it directly into the skull of one of Cal’s bodyguards approaching her from behind. He shuffles on his feet before falling back onto the concrete beneath him like a collapsing wall as she quickly and effortlessly props one knee up and grabs another knife from under her skirt. With the precision of a skilled assassin, she sends the knife into the chest of the other bodyguard. Her training shines through her fluid movements. He cries out, gripping the blade that’s stuck directly in the center of his chest. Pulling it out, he tosses it to the floor with an echoed clang, stalking forward on heavy feet, his deadly gaze set on her as he pulls a gun from his side. She stands straight before him, her chin lifted, staring at him defiantly. He raises the gun at her, and she closes her eyes. I pull violently against my cuffs, needing to be freed before he can hurt her, no matter if that means ripping my arms off at the shoulders. But before I get ahead of myself, the guard takes two more steps, stumbling slightly before a shot from across the room earns him a bullet to the back of his head. The man’s blood splatters across Briony’s face and neck as she flinches. Callum looks entirely stunned while Nox’s barrel remains set on him, both of them with arms outstretched, guns ready to fire. Bishop Caldwell gasps in horror when Baret steps out from behind the stage area, his own smoking weapon aimed directly at him and his attempt to escape. His decrepit old hands shake before him as he surrenders on his knees like the fucking coward he is. Alastor grabs a gun from within his suit jacket and rushes towards me, placing it against my temple. “Now, now, now...” he says calmly, looking around the room. “Let’s just all take a nice deep breath before someone important gets hurt, huh?

Eddie Grace's buick Got four bullet holes in the side Charley Delisle is sittin' at the top Of an avocado tree Mrs Storm will stab you with a steak knife If you step on her lawn I got a half a pack of lucky strikes man So come along with me Let's fill our pockets With macadamia nuts And go over to Bobby Goodmanson's And jump off the roof Hilda plays strip poker When her mama's across the street Joey Navinsky says she put Her tongue in his mouth Dicky Faulkner's got a switchblade And some gooseneck risers That eucalyptus is a hunchback There's a wind down from the south So let me tie you up with kite string I'll show you the scabs on my knee Watch out for the broken glass Put your shoes and socks on And come along with me Let's follow that fire truck I think your house is burning down Then go down to the hobo jungle And kill some rattlesnakes with a trowel And we'll break all the windows In the old Anderson place We'll steal a bunch of boysenberrys And smear 'em on your face I'll get a dollar from my mama's purse Buy that skull and crossbones ring And you can wear it round your neck On an old piece of string Then we'll spit on Ronnie Arnold And flip him the bird Slash the tires on the school bus Now don't say a word I'll take a rusty nail Scratch your initials in my arm I'll show you how to sneak up on the roof Of the drugstore I'll take the spokes from your wheelchair And a magpie's wings And I'll tie 'em to your shoulders And your feet I'll steal a hacksaw from my dad Cut the braces off your legs And we'll bury them tonight Out in the cornfield Just put a church key in your pocket We'll hop that freight train in the hall We'll slide all the way down the drain To New Orleans in the fall

Should I have a gun? Just in case?” “What kind of training do you have?” “I’ve seen a lot of movies. As far as I can tell, as long as you’re the good guy the bullet just goes right into their heads. It’s only the bad guys that miss.

His eyes widen one last time as his mouth opens, seeking the air that he’s being deprived. Dark eyes peer up at mine as Aero drops the man with a thud against the wooden floor beneath him. His anger is penetrating me; his body, shaking with rage. This isn’t the man I was with a moment ago. This is the psychotic, trained assassin who’s put numerous bodies into the ground like it was nothing. Another masked man enters the room behind him. Aero slides to the floor, seamlessly pulling the gun from the deceased man’s holster. He leans his back against the end of the bed with his legs spread out before him as his arms straighten, aiming. Firing once, the silencer captures the sound as the bullet finds the skull of the shocked intruder. He stumbles back against the door before his legs give way and he slowly sinks to the floor beneath him, leaving a splatter of bright red blood on the wood behind him.

C'mon, Jack! Time to eat!" From the trees, her crow shot towards her like a bullet. Rain didn't even look. She just held up her arm, giving him a place to land. In that moment, I realized she was definitely the Morrigan. Not one in training, and not going to grow into one. No, Rain was already embracing her power - and it looked amazing on her.

What’s the matter, chile? The debil chasin’ after you?” Emma paused to take a deep breath and recover her dignity. “Yes,” she said. “Do you know where Chloe put Mr. Fair—Steven’s pistol?” “She done locked it up in her desk drawer with the derringer. Why? You gonna give it back to him?” Emma nodded, then proceeded toward the hallway. “I most certainly am.” “Why you wanna do that?” Daisy fussed, following her out of the kitchen and into Chloe’s study. Finding the key in its customary hiding place, Emma unlocked Chloe’s desk and lifted the formidable Colt .45 gingerly from its depths. “There’s always the hope that he’ll shoot himself,” she said cheerfully. Daisy shrank back against the doorway. “Miss Emma, you put that thing down right now, or I’s gonna take you over my knee and paddle you!” Emma raised the gun and sited in on a book shelf across the room. She wondered what it would be like to fire the weapon. In the next instant she found out, for the gun went off with no intentional help from Emma, and several of Chloe’s leatherbound books exploded into a single smoldering tangle of paper. Daisy screamed and so did Emma, who dropped the gun in horror only to have it fire again, this time splintering the leg of Big John’s favorite chair. “Don’t you dare touch that thing again!” Daisy shrieked, when Emma bent to retrieve it. Emma left the pistol lying on the rug and straightened up again, one hand pressed to her mouth in shock. The two women stood in their places for a long time, afraid to move. Emma, for her part, was busy imagining all the dreadful things that could have happened. She was amazed to see Steven stumble into the room, fully dressed except for his boots, drenched in sweat from the effort of making his way down the stairs in a hurry. The expression in his eyes was wild and alert, almost predatory. “What the hell’s going on in here?” he rasped. Emma pointed to the pistol as though it were a snake coiled to strike. “It went off—twice.” Steven was supporting himself by grasping the edge of Chloe’s desk. “Pick it up very carefully and hand it to me,” he said. Emma bit her lower lip, remembering what had happened when she’d handled the gun before. “You can do it,” Steven urged. “Just make sure you don’t touch the hammer or the trigger.” Emma crouched and picked it up cautiously. The barrel was hot against her palm. “Here,” Steven said, holding out his hand. Emma surrendered the gun, and leaning back against the desk, Steven spun the chamber expertly, dropping the four remaining bullets into his palm. He gave a ragged sigh, then just stood there, cradling the pistol in his hands like a kitten or a puppy. “I was going to bring it to you,” Emma confessed in a small voice. “She was hopin’ you’d blow your brains out with it,” Daisy muttered, before she turned and went back to the kitchen. Steven

an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head. Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers. “Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance. Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin. Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass. Dewey ran

My aunt sat with me under the wheels and took out a little notebook that contained the names and addresses of our relatives in America. She told me to learn all of this by heart because you never know who the bullet will hit, and when the war would end, I should contact these relatives and ask them to take me in. I listened to her and learned everything by heart. Even today, I remember some of these names and addresses. Leslie

A seeker of radical strenght Keeps everything on track, Feeble force yields at length, Not sure where to go back. When one can't find courage, And all the efforts seem vain, It's advised to fight like a sage: Be powerful like a bullet train! Too much work and no play Can make a brain go astray! Determined to live and stay Can lead life into a long way.

every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable and timely objectives, would also have to identify a stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it. Everyone, Welch said, had to partake in “bullet train thinking.

He is a particular kind of Wisconsinite, she understands. The world is a bullet train that has passed him by so quickly, it's as if he's standing on the side of the tracks spinning like a weather vane.

Watch him, he’s dangerous.’ ‘He’s lying,’ said Frederic, stepping closer. ‘I need you to stop,’ warned Etienne, keeping his gun trained on Frederic while he took out his radio with his other hand. ‘Don’t do that,’ warned Frederic, coming even closer. ‘Stop!’ Frederic’s demeanor changed. He was wired, and Pierre saw that he had begun to shake. He would not be able to control himself for much longer. Etienne pressed the radio’s talk button. ‘I need assistance.’ ‘Coming in, over, is that you, Etienne?’ ‘Yes, I —’ Chapter 54 Before the officer could say another word, Frederic lashed out with his right hand. He had retrieved his pistol that was wedged in his back belt and fired off a single bullet with perfect precision, right between the young officer’s brown eyes. The policeman’s body fell backwards, hands flailing as they hit the ground, his radio and pistol skittering away across the marble floor. He’d been killed instantly and now lay still, eyes wide open. Frederic turned his angry gaze on Pierre. ‘I’m so sorry, Frederic,’ said Pierre, back-pedaling. ‘I had no choice, you have to understand that.’ ‘No, boss, you always have a choice,’ said Frederic with a sigh. ‘You just picked the wrong one.’ Frederic trained his weapon on his longtime friend, his hand now rock-steady. ‘So it seems you will never get to see the inside of Alexander the Great’s tomb after all.’ ‘No, Frederic, don’t be stupid. I made a mistake.’ ‘Yes, you did,’ replied Frederic, and with no remorse emptied his gun’s chamber.

When that grenade blew me over the cliff, it probably should have killed me, but the only new injury I had sustained was a broken nose, which I got when I hit the deck semiconscious. To be honest, it hurt like hell, along with my back, and I was bleeding all over my gear. However, I had not been seriously shot, as two of my team had. Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing. I was close to him in a similar stance, and we were both hitting them pretty good. One guy suddenly jumped up from nowhere a little above us, and I shot him dead, about thirty yards range. But we were trapped again. There were still around eighty of these maniacs coming down at us, and that’s a heck of a lot of enemies. I’m not sure what their casualty rate was, because both Mikey and I estimated Sharmak had thrown 140 men minimum into this fight. Whatever, they were still there, and I was not sure how long Danny could keep going. Mikey worked his way alongside me and said with vintage Murphy humor, “Man, this really sucks.” I turned to face him and told him, “We’re gonna fucking die out here — if we’re not careful.” “I know,” he replied. And the battle raged on. The massed, wild gunfire of a very determined enemy against our more accurate, better-trained response, superior concentration, and war-fighting know-how. Once more, hundreds of bullets were ricocheting around our rocky surroundings. And once more, the Taliban went to the grenades, blasting the terrain around us to pieces. Jammed between rocks, we kept firing, but Danny was in all kinds of trouble, and I was afraid he might lose consciousness.

Riddled his body with bullets”—my da talked like that. Mam was always shushing him, but he waved her off. “It’s important they know this,” he said. “It’s their history! We might be over here now, but by God, our people are over there.

You crossed over? You were trained in Pakistan?’ Naga asked Aijaz once he was sure Ashfaq Mir was out of earshot. ‘No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons . . . We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for –’ ‘From the army?’ ‘Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.

A mad person without the capacity for self-analysis or the support of professional therapy, is like a bullet-train without breaks heading for a cliff. Everyone on board, spouses included, will finish themselves before they can stop it.

The building was a sniper’s heaven; it was long with dozens of windows and many points of view. Three floors. Someone had put cardboard in each of the panes, dozens of cardboard boxes, making it almost impossible to see inside. The marines kept firing, thousands and thousands of rounds. The barrels of their machine guns glowed and sagged. “Get me another barrel,” one of the kids said. More firing commenced. “I don’t know who he is, but he is very well trained,” said Lieutenant Steven Berch, another one of the platoon leaders. Omohundro was downstairs. He listened to the commotion and called in an airstrike. “Just blow the building to shit,” he said. First a 2,000 -pound bomb, then a 500 -pounder flew into the building and burst. A cloud unfolded upward and revealed a gigantic fire. It rose through the ruined ceiling. Part of a wall collapsed. Crack! Crack! Crack! The marines ducked, cursed loudly and returned fire. No one spotted the sniper this time. The sniper fired back. The marines responded with another blast of gunfire, many thousands of rounds. I stood with some guys at the back of the roof, behind a shed. A blue and green parakeet fluttered out of the sky and hovered in tight circles. Bullets flew past. The parakeet landed on a slumping power line. The marines stared in amazement. “Someone’s pet?” a marine said. I ran across the top of the roof and the sniper took a shot. Crack! The bullet whizzed by. An artillery barrage began. First came the 155 mm shells, each filled with fifty pounds of high explosives. One after the other the shells sailed into the building. Fire swept through the three floors. What was left of the ceiling collapsed in the smoke. Cardboard sailed out of shattered windows. Twenty shells, then thirty, each one large enough to end the world. The shelling ceased and the shooting stopped. The building burned. Remarkably it still had a frame, and parts of its three floors still stood. Suddenly a sound rustled from a storefront on the first floor. The marines tensed. A cat sauntered out, dirty yellow, tail in the air. It walked like a runway model in front of a construction site. “Can I shoot it, sir?” a marine asked his squad leader. “Absolutely not,” came the reply. Crack!

The Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.

Creed must have responded in kind, because with a gasp, she broke off the kiss. Time crawled to a standstill, then shifted to a sprint. Nieve shoved the gun lodged between them into his ribs. His hand still covered hers, and with the well-trained instincts of an assassin, he jerked the gun to the side so that the bullet she fired embedded into the ground, kicking up dirt, and not in his heart.

Damned bad luck! “Stop that locomotive!” he yelled. His men drew carbines from their saddle packs and let loose a volley at the train. The engineer spun round in agony, two bullets having smashed into his chest, and he collapsed dying on the footplate, but the stoker kept his head down and ensured the train carried on past the station and away to get help. “Hell, bad luck,” Stuart muttered. “Okay men, leave the ammunition and clothing in a huge pile and set it on fire! And the alcohol. No drink is to be taken, d’ya hear?” “Yes general,” his aide saluted, and trotted away, barking orders. They burned the station and rode off south, knowing now that the Union pursuit would be closing in on them. Ahead was the Chickahominy

We don't talk about the danger -- but what I imagine is a cartoon version, bullets flying and each boy a super hero, running, invincible, through a spray of gunfire.