Cards Stacked Against You Quotes

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

Thank you, Josh. Thank you for ruining my capacity to trust so that any guy that comes after you will automatically have the cards stacked against him.

When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules. You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you’re fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

The strange collection of bedfellows currently involved in the political movement that I call fructophobia, the attack on sugar, forgot to tell you that sugar is a carbohydrate. If you cut out sugar and replace it with “healthy” high-grain, high-carbohydrate oatmeal, you are stacking the cards against yourself.

When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules.

One word, one gesture, and all that is pent up in you - festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires - unfulfilled - all that will burst out of you in angry impotent tears - in embarrassed sobbing and blubbering to no one in particular. No arms will enfold you, no voice will say, 'There, There. Sleep and forget.' No, in your new and horrible independence you feel the dangerous premonitory ache, arising from little sleep and taut strung nerves, and a feeling that the cards have been stacked high against you this once, and that they are still being heaped up. An outlet you need, and they are sealed. You live night and day in the dark cramped prison you have made for yourself.

Who would help you when you were brought this low? No matter how hard you toiled, you would never rise, never have enough for a safe bed, a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes. Because in every instance, the cards were stacked against you. When you were that poor, no one cared if you lived or died. Not even magic could save you then.

... too many people think life is basically an oversized game of Monopoly, where the way to win is to accumulate as many properties as you can, either by purchasing outright or by clever trading with your opponents. Then you keep adding houses and hotels, extracting rent from others, until you eventually drive them to bankruptcy. You sit back, rub your hands together, and start counting your stacks of cash. No, life is more like Uno or Crazy Eights, where the point is to run out of cards first. You want to deploy every card you have, knowing that each card left in your hand at the end counts against you. Don't get stuck at the time of your funeral with leftover cards.

She had several books she'd been wanting to read, but instead she sprawled out on the couch surrounded by pillows and blankets, and spent the hours flipping channels between Judge Judy, The People's Court, Maury, and Jerry Springer, and rounded out her afternoon with Dr. Phil and Oprah. All in all, it was a complete waste of a day. At least until school got out. Jay showed up after school with a bouquet of flowers and an armful of DVDs, although Violet couldn't have card less about either...he was all she wanted. She couldn't help the electric thrill of excitement she felt when he came strolling in, grinning at her foolishly as if he hadn't seen her in weeks rather than hours. He scooped her up from the couch and dropped her onto his lap as he sat down where she had been just a moment before. He was careful to arrange her ankle on a neatly stacked pile of pillows beside him. He stubbornly refused to hide his affection for her, and if Violet hadn't known better she would have sworn that he was going out of his way to make her self-conscious in her own home. Fortunately her parents were giving them some space for the time being, and they were left by themselves most of the time. "Did you miss me?" he asked arrogantly as he gently brushed his lips over hers, not bothering to wait for an answer. She smiled while she kissed him back, loving the topsy-turvy feeling that her stomach always got when he was so close to her. She wound her arms around his neck, forgetting that she was in the middle of the family room and not hidden away in the privacy of her bedroom. He pulled away from her, suddenly serious. "You know, we didn't get much time alone yesterday. And I didn't get a chance to tell you..." Violet was mesmerized by the thick timbre of his deep voice. She barely heard his words but rather concentrated on the fluid masculinity of his tone. "I feel like I've waited too long to finally have you, and then yesterday...when..." He stopped, seemingly at a loss, and then he tried another approach. His hand stroked her cheek, igniting a response from deep within her. "I can't imagine living without you," he said, tenderly kissing her forehead, his warm breath fanning her brow. He paused thoughtfully for a moment before speaking again. "I love you, Violet. More than I ever could have imagined. And I don't want to lose you...I can't lose you." It was her turn to look arrogant as she glanced up at him. "I know," she stated smugly, shrugging her shoulder. He shoved her playfully but held on to her tightly so that she never really went anywhere. "What do you mean, 'I know'? What kind of response is that?" His righteous indignation bordered on comical. He pulled her down into his arms so that his face was directly above hers. "Say it!" he commanded. She shook her head, pretending not to understand him. "What? What do you want me to say?" But then she giggled and ruined her baffled façade. He teased her with his mouth, leaning down to kiss her and then pulling away before his lips ever reached hers. He nuzzled her neck tantalizingly, only to stop once she responded. She wrapped her arms around his neck, trying to pull him closer, frustrated by his mocking ambush of her senses. "Say it," he whispered, his breath warm against her neck. She groaned, wanting him to put her out of her misery. "I love you too," she rasped as she clung to him. "I love you so much..." His mouth moved to cover hers in an exhausting kiss that left them broth breathless and craving more than they could have. Violet collapsed into his arms, gathering her wits and hoping that no one walked in on them anytime soon.

Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users. You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.” If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you. Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons. Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users. You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.” If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you. Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

But…but that’s tragic! To go through life without color? Unable to appreciate art, or beauty?” He laughed. “Now, sweet-hold your brush before you paint me a martyr’s halo. It’s not as though I’m blind. I have a great appreciation for art, as I believe we’ve discussed. And as for beauty…I don’t need to know whether your eyes are blue or green or lavender to know that they’re uncommonly lovely.” “No one has lavender eyes.” “Don’t they?” His gaze caught hers and refused to let go. Leaning forward, he continued, “Did that tutor of yours ever tell you this? That your eyes are ringed with a perfect circle a few shades darker than the rest of the…don’t they call it the iris?” Sophia nodded. “The iris.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned forward, his gaze searching hers intently. “An apt term it is, too. There are these lighter rays that fan out from the center, like petals. And when your pupils widen-like that, right there-your eyes are like two flowers just coming into bloom. Fresh. Innocent.” She bowed her head, mixing a touch of lead white into the sea-green paint on her palette. He leaned closer still, his voice a hypnotic whisper. “But when you take delight in teasing me, looking up through those thick lashes, so saucy and self-satisfied…” She gave him a sharp look. He snapped his fingers. “There! Just like that. Oh, sweet-then those eyes are like two opera dancers smiling from behind big, feathered fans. Coy. Beckoning.” Sophia felt a hot blush spreading from her bosom to her throat. He smiled and reclined in his chair. “I don’t need to know the color of your hair to see that it’s smooth and shiny as silk. I don’t need to know whether it’s yellow or orange or red to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how it would feel brushing against my bare skin.” Opening his book to the marked page, he continued, “And don’t get me started on your lips, sweet. If I endeavored to discover the precise shade of red or pink or violet they are, I might never muster the concentration for anything else.” He turned a leaf of his book, then fell silent. Sophia stared at her canvas. Her pulse pounded in her ears. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, channeling down between her shoulder blades, and a hot, itchy longing pooled at the cleft of her legs. Drat him. He’d known she was taunting him with her stories. And now he sat there in an attitude of near-boredom, making love to her with his teasing, colorless words in a blatant attempt to fluster her. It was as though they were playing a game of cards, and he’d just raised the stakes. Sophia smiled. She always won at cards. “Balderdash,” she said calmly. He looked up at her, eyebrow raised. “No one has violet lips.” “Don’t they?” She laid aside her palette and crossed her arms on the table. “The slope of your nose is quite distinctive.” His lips quirked in a lopsided grin. “Really.” “Yes.” She leaned forward, allowing her bosom to spill against her stacked arms. His gaze dipped, but quickly returned to hers. “The way you have that little bump at the ridge…It’s proving quite a challenge.” “Is that so?” He bent his head and studied his book. Sophie stared at him, waiting one…two…three beats before he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose. Quite satisfactory progress, that. Definite beginnings of fluster.

The Temperance (XIV) Card “Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzards supping on a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish clouds gathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck. A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines, shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believe is the one you'll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south. You might say this about exile, mountains eroded by six hundred years of women's feet, the heavy press from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south, mothers find their daughters' bodies in boxes. The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigo against the black land, as monstrously beautiful as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names the dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm.

You learn early on that you can't show fear or weakness. The cards are stacked against you already for not being police or forensics. And for being a woman. So, you perfect your swagger.

Fighting against the system is like going against a house of cards. The deck will always be stacked against you!

John D. MacDonald, my favorite Florida writer—yeah, I read a bit—once began a book: “There are no hundred percent heroes.” If you ask my customers, they’d probably give me 51 percent. MacDonald also wrote, “If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.” Well, I’m tired of holding a pair of deuces or a busted flush. Tired of the grind. Tired of losing. Which is why on this sweaty July day with a sky as gray as an angry ocean, I needed an innocent client.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

Have you had much luck tonight?” she asked. His gaze slipped to the neat stacks of coins in front of her. “No’ as much as ye, my lady.” She let her own stare trail across her piles of winnings. Shame sizzled against her cheeks.,,, “Perhaps I’m lucky tonight myself,” he said. The silky undertone in his voice crept up her back like the skilled swipe of a musician’s fingers strumming a harp. “What do you mean?” Of course she knew what he meant, but the glint of flirtation in his eye begged her to prompt him for the compliment. A golden dollop of honey dribbled to lure the bee. And she buzzed ever closer. He pulled his freshly dealt cards toward him. “Perhaps I’m lucky tonight because I’ve met ye.

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance A planet of play things We dance on the strings Of powers we cannot perceive 'The stars aren't aligned Or the gods are malign...' Blame is better to give than receive You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill I will choose a path that's clear I will choose freewill There are those who think That they were dealt a losing hand The cards were stacked against them They weren't born in Lotus Land All preordained A prisoner in chains A victim of venomous fate Kicked in the face You can't pray for a place In heaven's unearthly estate Each of us A cell of awareness Imperfect and incomplete Genetic blends With uncertain ends On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet

As always when he went abroad, Jonathan regarded the German passport officers with a degree of wistfulness. Soon he would be placing himself under foreign sovereignty, a guest; he would have to hold his tongue instead of being allowed to demonstrate his superiority. When you'd started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people's bicycles away (in Holland) the cards were stacked against you.

If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice within says the same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how reliable can it be? Maybe its comments are chatter, not wisdom. "There will always be people better than you" - that's a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, "in a million years, who's going to know the difference?". The proper response to that statement is not, "well, then, everything is meaningless". It's "any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters". Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It's a cheap trick of the rational mind.

I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time. Swaying on the back landing in the small hours, I stare at the boxy garage and ghostly replicas of it multiplying along either side, like playing cards spread against the slate sky. Though this plural perspective is standard, I’m surprised by my own shitfaced state. The walkman sends punk rock banging across the tiny bones of my ears. And with the phonebook-sized stack of papers on my lap still unmarked, I—once more, with feeling—take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here. Okay, I say in my head. I give. You’re right. (Who am I talking to? Fighting with?) By the next afternoon, while I’m lugging the third armload of groceries up the back stairs, Dev, who’s bolted ahead to the living room, shrieks like he’s been stabbed, and I drop the sack on the kitchen floor, hearing as it hits what must be a jar of tomato sauce detonating. In the living room, I find Dev has leaped—illicitly, for the nine hundredth time—off the sofa back, trying to land in the clothes basket like a circus diver into a bucket of water. He’s whapped his noggin on the coffee table corner. Now dead center on his pale, formerly smooth forehead, there’s a blue knot like a horn trying to break through. I gather him up and rush to the kitchen, aiming to grab a soothing bag of frozen peas. But I step on a shard of tomato sauce jar, gash my instep, slide as on a banana peel, barely hanging on to Dev till we skid to a stop. I tiptoe across the linoleum, dragging a snail of blood till I can plop him in a kitchen chair, instructing him to hold the peas to his head and not move an inch while I bunny-hop upstairs to bandage my foot. Coming back, I find he’s dragged the formerly white laundry into the kitchen to mop up the tomato sauce. I’m helping, he says, albeit surrounded by gleaming daggers of glass while on his forehead the blue Bambi horn seems to throb. Minutes later, my hand twists off a beer cap as I tell myself that a beer isn’t really a drink after all. So I have another after that to speed preparing the pot roast, and maybe even a third. Before we head to the park, I tuck two more beer bottles in my coat pocket, plus one in my purse alongside a juice box.

Listen. baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.