“
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Fedin laughed outright, a grim, calculating gesture as hard and unfeeling as cold steel. “Twenty million Russians have been slaughtered by the Fascists in the last six years..... Always remember this, Squadron Leader. It was our war, our victory and now it is our Berlin. We tolerate your presence in this city… if that.
”
”
K.G.E. Konkel (Who Has Buried the Dead?: From Stalin to Putin … The last great secret of World War Two)
“
At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths—first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
But you don’t have to be part of a group to understand that they’re being mistreated. Justice doesn’t require a membership card. Just a sense of right and wrong.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Will you come down and kiss me good night?
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
You haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
There isn’t a time set for Nikulin’s transfer. All we know for now is two Iraqi agents are going to Amsterdam—at least we think it’s that city. And we don’t know when this will occur. I will call you when we find out.
”
”
Karl Braungart (Lost Identity (Remmich/Miller, #1))
“
She could feel the frigid city’s misery flooding the space where her heart used to be.
”
”
Jana Petken (The Man from Section Five: A Brinley Knight Spy Thriller (The Man from MI5 Book 1))
“
So, uh,” I said, shuffling from one foot to the other, “want to go with me to check up on Obliteration? If you’re not doing anything else important, I mean.”
She cocked her head. “Did you just invite me on a date … to spy on a deadly Epic planning to destroy the city?”
“Well, I don’t have a lot of experience with dating, but I’ve always heard you’re supposed to pick something you know the girl will enjoy...”
She smiled. “Well, let’s get to it then.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Firefight (The Reckoners, #2))
“
-You know I've always wanted to break the molds which life forms around one if one lets them.
-Why?
-I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place, without hope of change.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Have - have you got an appointment?' he said.
'I don't know,' said Carrot. 'Have we got an appointment?'
'I've got an iron ball with spikes on,' Nobby volunteered.
'That's a morningstar, Nobby.'
'Is it?'
'Yes,' said Carrot. 'An appointment is an engagement to see someone, while a morningstar is a large lump of metal used for viciously crushing skulls. It is important not to confuse the two, isn't it, Mr-?' He raised his eyebrows.
'Boffo, sir. But-'
'So if you could perhaps run along and tell Dr Whiteface we're here with an iron ball with spi- What am I saying? I mean, without an appointment to see him? Please? Thank you.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Men at Arms (Discworld, #15; City Watch, #2))
“
There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Only fools and liars speak with certainty about things beyond their control.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them?
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
At sixteen Sabina took moon baths, first of all because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect. The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be?
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
You cannot achieve what you cannot believe.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
You call that a sound system?” asked Sydney. “It’s a cassette player. It’s from the 1900s.”
“Yeah, well, so am I,” Monty replied.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies #2))
“
And just because she could, just because they were headed to Terrasen at last, Aelin unleashed a flicker of her power. Some of the standard-bearers behind them murmured in surprise, but Rowan only smiled. Smiled with that fierce hope, that brutal determination that flared in her own heart, as she began to burn. She let the flame encompass her, a golden glow that she knew could be spied even from the farthest lines of the army, from the city and keep they left behind. A beacon glowing bright in the shadows of the mountains, in the shadows of the forces that awaited them, Aelin lit the way north.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
“
Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals?
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
You're not suggesting that Vetinari tucks into a nice rat every day?" said Angua.
"I've heard he uses rats as spies, so I don't think he'd use them as elevenses," said Carrot.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Feet of Clay (Discworld, #19; City Watch, #3))
“
All rise for the Honorable Lyman J. Pancake. Court is now in session.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
The Bodleian’s a highly secure building.”
“That was built when the cutting edge of security was a moat and a man with a pointy stick,” Monty said with a laugh.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies #2))
“
DISLIKES: Practically allergic to following rules.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
you don’t have to be part of a group to understand that they’re being mistreated.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous openess which takes place in whole love.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
No buts,” Rio said, cutting her off. “There’s no way I’m changing my mind.” “I’ll give you the other half of my sandwich,” she said, holding it up. “Deal,” he said without hesitation as he snatched it from her hand. “Kat’s the lookout.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
Writers make everybody nervous but we terrify Silly Service workers. Our apartments always look like a front for something, and no matter how carefully we tidy up for guests we always seem to miss the note card that says, "Margaret has to die soon." We own the kind of books that spies use to construct codes, like The Letters of Mme. de Sevigne, and we are the only people in the world who write oxymoron in the margin of the Bible. Manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire, Strunk's Elements in the bathroom, the Laramie City Directory explained away with "It might come in handy," all strike fear in the GS-7 heart. Nobody really wants to sleep with a writer, but Silly Service workers won't even talk to us.
”
”
Florence King (Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady: A Memoir)
“
For the second time in less than fifteen minutes, Kat’s words had silenced the room.
Monty laughed and said, “For someone who never talks, you sure know what to say.”
Kat smiled wryly and answered, “I pick my moments.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies #2))
“
Bad guys never wait, so good guys can’t be late.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
Justice doesn’t require a membership card. Just a sense of right and wrong.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
But the man continuing to exclaim, "Down, Evremonde!" the face of Evremonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evremonde then sees the Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes his way.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the facts.
[...] in self-defense, I accuse the writers of fairy-tales. Not hunger, not cruelty, not my parents, but these tales which promised that sleeping in the snow never caused pneumonia, that bread never turned stale, that trees blossomed out of season, that dragons could be killed with courage, that intense wishing would be followed immediately by fulfillment of the wish. Intrepid wishing, said the fairytales, was more effective than labor. The smoke issuing from Aladdin's lamp was my first smokescreen, and the lies learned from fairytales were my first perjuries. Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?
”
”
Alan Moore (Watchmen)
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
Never forget that ‘ordinary’ is part of ‘extraordinary’; you can’t have one without the other.
”
”
James Ponti (Forbidden City (City Spies, #3))
“
Being small doesn’t scare me. Zero is small, but it’s the most powerful number of all.” 37.
”
”
James Ponti (City of the Dead (City Spies #4))
“
What I corrupted is what is called the truth in favour of a more marvellous world.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind. This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of her self the night before were difficult to reassemble. She was like an actress who must compose a face, an attitude to meet the day.
The eyebrow pencil was no mere charcoal emphasis on blond eyebrows, but a design necessary to balance a chaotic asymmetry. Make up and powder were not simply applied to heighten a porcelain texture, to efface the uneven swellings caused by sleep, but to smooth out the sharp furrows designed by nightmares, to reform the contours and blurred surfaces of the cheeks, to erase the contradictions and conflicts which strained the clarity of the face’s lines, disturbing the purity of its forms.
She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile.
Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair, and costume, for a fissure through which to explode.
What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful. The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty emerged which had been frayed and marred by anxiety.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
It was like being a spy, carrying out perpetual surveillance. It was like becoming a teenager again, plunging into pools of obsession, moving on, riding the rocking swells, the changing surf.
”
”
Olivia Laing (The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone)
“
Do you know, when I am with you I am not afraid at all. It is a magic altogether curious that happens inside the heart. I wish I could take it with me when I leave.
It is sad, my Grey. We are constrained by the rules of this Game we play. There is not one little place under those rules for me to be with you happily. Or apart happily, which is what makes it so unfair.
I have discovered a curious fact about myself. An hour ago I was sure you were dead, and it hurt very much. Now you are alive, and it is only that I must leave you, and I find that even more painful. That is not at all logical.
Do you know the Symposium, Grey? The Symposium of Plato. [He] says that lovers are like two parts of an egg that fit together perfectly. Each half is made for the other, the single match to it. We are incomplete alone. Together, we are whole. All men are seeking that other half of themselves. Do you remember?
I think you are the other half of me. It was a great mix-up in heaven. A scandal. For you there was meant to be a pretty English schoolgirl in the city of Bath and for me some fine Italian pastry cook in Palermo. But the cradles were switched somehow, and it all ended up like this…of an impossibility beyond words.
I wish I had never met you. And in all my life I will not forget lying beside you, body to body, and wanting you.
”
”
Joanna Bourne (The Spymaster's Lady (Spymasters, #1))
“
Dead ends are only course corrections to help you find the right direction.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies, #2))
“
Em homeopatia há um remédio chamado pulsatila para aqueles que choram com a música.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
He pictured both cities simultaneously, as though they hung on the extended arms of the orange clouds. Suspended. Tiny San Francisco dangling to the north: innocent, rich and a little bit silly. The sprawling, demented snake of L.A. to the south. Its fanged mouth wide open, eyes blazing, paralyzed in a lunge of pure paranoia. This was the place to be, he thought. Right here. In the middle. Smack in the belly of California where he could eyeball both from a distance. He could live inside the intestines of this valley while he spied on the brain and the genitals.
”
”
Sam Shepard (Motel Chronicles)
“
Pirates have seized the boat,” Brooklyn said. “I think they’re coming for the two of you.”
“Pirates?” Judy gave her a confused look. “You mean with peg legs and parrots?”
“Yes, and a crocodile with a loud clock in its stomach,” Brooklyn replied sarcastically. “This isn’t a storybook. These are actual twenty-first-century criminals at sea. And you two are the most valuable treasure on this boat.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies #2))
“
She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own doctors, their own communities.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils, stands the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them: not there. He looks into the second: not there. He already asks himself, "Has he sacrificed me?" when his face clears, as he looks into the third. "Which is Evremonde?" says a man behind
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
Four specific missions were assigned: to spy on the nguy and American forces in the city; to recruit civilians to join the uprising and provide support; to train them with weapons and tactics; and to build a committed core who, when the battle began, would carry the wounded to medical stations in the rear and help feed the army. Weapons, ammo, food, and medical provisions all would be smuggled, stockpiled, and made ready.
”
”
Mark Bowden (Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam)
“
Who am I? Am I the blood within my veins? The heart that always strains, to ease the pains of others? Am I the name that I’ve been given? Does that explain why I am driven? Does that honor my father and my mother? What is it that you find, when the stars somehow align? And begin to define the essence that is mine? “Who am I? I am brother, I am son I am many, I am one I am more than I can comprehend And forever I’m your friend.
”
”
James Ponti (Forbidden City (City Spies, #3))
“
all Washington could do was carry in his heart the gratitude he had for the sacrifices of his brave spies, which were no less meaningful for having been made in city streets and country back roads as on a battlefield.
”
”
Brian Kilmeade (George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution)
“
You haven't loved yet... You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
Keep telling yourself that,” Sydney said. “But you may be mistaking this for our mission in Egypt.” “Why do you say that?” Paris asked, confused. “Because you’re swimming in ‘da Nile,’ ” she joked, eliciting more laughter on the comms.
”
”
James Ponti (Mission Manhattan (City Spies, #5))
“
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
”
”
Michael Chabon (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh)
“
Back then, she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff's been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.
”
”
N.K. Jemisin (The City We Became (Great Cities, #1))
“
Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as our own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. ... Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labour in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not be taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
”
”
Étienne de La Boétie (The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude)
“
To manufacture trinitrotoluene, you must first produce mononitrotoluene by nitrating toluene with a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids. This must be renitrated to dinitrotoluene and then nitrated to trinitrotoluene by using an anhydrous mixture of nitric acid and oleum.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies, #2))
“
Yes, I used to say that I had housing problems: mine was that I didn’t want a house. I wanted a boat, a trailer, anything that moved freely. I feel safest of all when no one knows where I am, when for instance, I’m in a hotel room where even the number is scratched off the door.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
It’s totally your choice.” He tried to answer but the best he could do was “Amp-li-dope.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” “Amp-li-dope!” he pleaded. “I still can’t understand, but I’m guessing it’s probably antidote,” she answered. “That would be the wise choice.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies, #2))
“
This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm or your hand.
But look at your world and your life seems to shrink, to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?
This is a word, and a word is a spell - a promise to keep or a secret to tell. Controlling the word means the power to frame how the ages of history remember you name.
Are you hero or villain? A savior or spy? Some titles are lovely. Some titles are lies. You can claim who you are, now that you've found your voice. But those who are chosen will not have a choice.
This is a story as vast as the sea, but on its waters, you'll never be free. No matter your course, your future is set, and destiny laughs as she tightens the net.
Words to Kelannans are breath on a glass, but if it is written, it will come to pass. Is your sight growing clearer, the closer you look? The Book is a world, for the world is a book.
”
”
Traci Chee (The Storyteller (Sea of Ink and Gold, #3))
“
She understood why it angered her when others spoke of life as One life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself. Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief, the shortness of life's physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and and the journey towards it, vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time...But Sabina, activated by the moonrays, felt germinating in her the power to extend time in the ramifications of a myriad of lives and loves, to to expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the courtesan depositor of multiple desires.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (A Spy in the House of Love (Cities of the Interior, #4))
“
I’m Tru. I can do whatever I please. It’s under the name Harrison Marcus.” He smiled. “You don’t much look like a ‘Harrison Marcus.’ ” “Says the man named ‘Mother.
”
”
James Ponti (Golden Gate (City Spies, #2))
“
And thanks for stopping with the puns.” “It was fun at first, but I got board with it,
”
”
James Ponti (Forbidden City (City Spies, #3))
“
Kindness, interest, sensitivity, sincerity?
”
”
James Ponti (Forbidden City (City Spies, #3))
“
Being small doesn't scare me. Zero is small, but it's the most powerful number of all.
”
”
James Ponti (City of the Dead (City Spies #4))
“
One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child.
When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.
”
”
Samantha Harvey (Orbital)
“
For decades, Lebanon had lured not just revolutionaries but also poets, ideologues, artists, and all types of opposition figures and plotters. A weak state was both a blessing and a curse. In Beirut, there was no dictatorship to muzzle opinions—or your guns. The war had made the small Mediterranean country even more of a haven, a live training ground with a casino and restaurants that still served smoked salmon and caviar during cease-fires. There were breadlines and economic hardship, massacres and literary conferences. Every spy agency was in town: the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad.
”
”
Kim Ghattas (Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East)
“
Like many city dwellers, they'd had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in the small towns than in the big city. In a small town everyone was fully exposed; you couldn't even disappear in the crowd.
”
”
Hans Fallada (Every Man Dies Alone)
“
The Wall Street-based international banks created spies to march in protection of their profits. The armies turned against their masters. They decided they could create their own wealth and power. New York is crumbling. The Pentagon is stronger than ever. Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the top eastern universities haven’t produced a new idea or a constructive change for all their classical education. They have been swallowed by the Pentagon and spy contracts. The USA looks like a dance of death in every major city.
”
”
Mae Brussell (The Essential Mae Brussell: Investigations of Fascism in America)
“
Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.
It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins' table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.
("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins")
”
”
Lord Dunsany (Monster Mix)
“
He’s going to teach you and train you and drill you mercilessly. And you’re going to win those four tournaments.” “I’ll try my best,” he said. “Do or do not,” said Tru. “There is no try.” Paris laughed. “Did you seriously just quote Yoda to me?” “Why not?” Tru smiled. “Jedis and spies have a lot in common, don’t you think?
”
”
James Ponti (Forbidden City (City Spies, #3))
“
The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water.
Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
“
Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly half of the polite company—would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world—which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai...the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength and character with the ocean breeze that blew soft, irregular gusts across his face. First came the sharp tang of engine fuel mingled with an even more acrid burning smell, as though something unnatural had been set alight to blanket the city with a smoldering stench. A shift in the air's direction brought a fresher aroma of salt and brine floating in from the sea. It gave way to the hot smell of spices frying in oil, which in turn incongruously merged with the subtle reek of garbage.
”
”
Kathryn Guare (Deceptive Cadence (The Virtuosic Spy, #1))
“
Mpelelezi wa Tume ya Dunia kutoka Israeli Daniel Yehuda Ben-Asher Ebenezer, Mhebrania aliyeishi Givat Ram, Jerusalem, na mke wake mrembo Hadara na mtoto wake mzuri Navah Ebenezer, alikuwa Ukanda wa Gaza siku alipopigiwa simu na Kiongozi wa Kanda ya Asia-Australia ya Tume ya Dunia U Nanda – kutoka Copenhagen kuhusiana na wito wa haraka wa kuonana na Rais wa Tume ya Dunia. Yehuda aliondoka usiku kwenda Yangon, Myama, ambapo alionana na U Nanda na kupewa maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata. Mbali na maelekezo yote ya kikazi aliyotakiwa kuyafuata, Nanda alimkabidhi Yehuda kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Dickson Santana (bila kujua kama Mandi ni kachero wa Kolonia Santita) ili amsindikize mpaka stendi ya mabasi ya Maubin, nje ya Yangon. Baada ya hapo Yehuda alisafiri mpaka Copenhagen ambapo yeye na wenzake walikabidhiwa Operation Devil Cross, ya kung’oa mizizi ya Kolonia Santita duniani kote. Yehuda alifanya kosa kubwa kuonana na kachero wa Kolonia Santita Mandi Santana! Kwa sababu hiyo, sauti na picha ya Yehuda vilichukuliwa, watu wengi walikufa katika miji ya Copenhagen na Mexico City.
”
”
Enock Maregesi
“
While on a fourteen-day leave from Los Alamos, Hall boarded a train to New York City and simply walked into a Soviet trade office and gave a Soviet official a handwritten report on Los Alamos. It described the laboratory’s purpose and listed the names of the leading scientists working on the bomb project. In the months that followed, Hall managed to pass the Soviets much additional information, including critical information on the design for the implosion bomb. Hall was the perfect “walk-in” spy; he knew what the Russians needed to know about the atomic bomb project; he needed nothing himself and expected nothing. His sole purpose was to “save the world” from a nuclear war that he believed was inevitable if the United States emerged from the war with an atomic monopoly.
”
”
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
“
The whiff of whatever I’d gotten in the ladies’ room had definitely taken a big chunk out of any embarrassment I may have had left. Tonight had been my first time in a big-city club of any kind, let alone a strip or sex club. I had questions, was intensely curious, and between the clover weed and my partner’s hands all over me less than a half hour before, I wasn’t the least bit shy anymore about asking those questions. The little voice in my head was frantically waving for me to stop. I kicked the door shut on my little voice. Party pooper.
I half turned on my tuffet toward Ian, my right leg crossing over my left, also toward Ian. My little voice was banging on the door and screaming at me.
“Are people listening with our table anymore?” I whispered.
Ian glanced at the glowing surface. “No.”
“Good. So, what is it with men and titty bars?
”
”
Lisa Shearin (Night Shift (World of Kate Daniels, #8.5; SPI Files, #0.5; Psy-Changeling, #12.5; Barbarian, #1))
“
Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor’s preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum rolls the two flag-bearers hurled their flags high into the air and caught them, the crowd roaring in approval. The winner of the extremely dangerous horse race is presented with a palio, a standard bearing the effigy of the Virgin. In the last few years the jockeys have had to be professional by law, as when they were amateurs, corruption and bribery were rife. The teams wear a curious fancy dress encompassing styles from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. They are followed by gangs of young men, supporters, who create an atmosphere or intense rivalry and barely suppressed violence as they run through the narrow streets in the heat of the day. It was perfect. I took many more photographs. At the farmhouse that evening, after far too much Chianti, I and my friends played a bizarre game. In the dark, some of us moved lighted candles from one room to another, whilst others watched the effect of the light on faces and on the rooms from outside. It was like a strange living film of the paintings we had seen. Maybe Derek Jarman was spying on us.
”
”
Roger Allam (Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company)
“
The speaker onstage was a French actor Sydney didn’t recognize, but when he finished, the crowd cheered. “I don’t know what he said, but it must’ve been good,” she told Mother. “Maybe I should give my speech in French too.” “I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” he replied. “Especially since you only know about a dozen French words.” “Good point,” she said. “Although, on the plus side, I could say them all and still finish under my time limit.
”
”
James Ponti (City Spies (City Spies, #1))
“
VISIONS OF GRANDEUR
I'm walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door,
Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park,
Repeating two courses at Hard Knock's College,
And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly fish.
I'm hopping over an empty row house in Philadelphia,
Getting a seventy dollar manicure on a gondola in Venice,
Wearing a white pearl necklace stolen from Goodwill,
And running my first New York City marathon.
I'm discussing the meaning of life with my late cat Charlie.
Dating John Doe- the thirty-third chef at the White House,
Running non-stop on a broken leg through a bomb-blasted city,
And keeping a multi-lingual monkey named Alfredo as my pet.
I'm spying on two hundred and twenty-two homegrown terrorists from Iowa,
Worshiped by a red-headed gorilla named Salamander,
Sleeping with a giant teddy bear dressed in black leather,
And wearing hot pink lipstick over a shade of midnight blue.
”
”
Giorge Leedy (Uninhibited From Lust To Love)
“
There were plots afoot—plans of deceit, treason, and betrayal—and the only hope the Americans had to survive them was to be prepared. Washington knew that New York City was of the utmost strategic importance from a military perspective, but even he could not anticipate how crucial the intelligence collected there would be in saving the cause for liberty. And neither side, American nor British, could yet imagine just how deep the treachery reached within its own ranks.
”
”
Brian Kilmeade (George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution)
“
Why hadn't she just said yes? Then she could have driven alone back to the city [...] and picked up some guy and brought him back home and screwed him and kicked him out and then picked up her daughter at the train the next day like a spy or a con artist, as if the two sides of herself didn't even care to know each other. But it was too late for that. Not just in terms of her ever becoming the kind of woman who knew how to do that kind of thing, without exposing herself as deluded or pathetic or ridiculous.
”
”
Jonathan Dee
“
Wait,” he said. “Before we go anywhere, I need to know who you are. How do you know these things? How do I know you’re not the person trying to harm Beatriz and me? How do I know that I’m not leading you right to her?” Mother paused and took a sip of tea as he tried to think of what he could answer without blowing his cover. “It’s complicated. There’s only so much I can…” His speech began to slur, and his vision turned blurry. One of the last things he saw was the empty vial in Ferreira’s hand as the poison took effect.
”
”
James Ponti (Mission Manhattan (City Spies, #5))
“
Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my angel-infancy,
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race1,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back—at that short space—
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud, or flower,
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several2 sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshy dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
Oh how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train3;
From whence the enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm trees4.
But ah! my soul with too much stay5
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.
”
”
Henry Vaughan
“
The brutality of the regime knows no bounds. It does not remain neutral towards the people here; it creates beasts in its own image out of ordinary people who might have been neighbors instead. Even more dangerous was the fact that the fundamentals of humanity and the ABCs of life have been eviscerated from the hearts of many people here. State television destroys human compassion, the sort of fundamental empathy that is not contingent upon a political or even a cultural orientation, and through which one human being can relate to another. The al-Dunya channel stirs up hatred, broadcasts fake news and maligns any opposing viewpoint. I wasn't the only one subjected to internet attacks by the security services and the Ba'thists, even if the campaign against me may be fiercer because I come from the Alawite community and have a lot of family connections to them -- because I am a woman and it's supposedly easier to break me with rumors and character assassinations and insults. Some of my actress friends who expressed sympathy for the children of Dar'a and called for an end to the siege of the city were subjected to a campaign of character assassinations and called traitors, then forced to appear on state television in order to clarify their position. Friends who expressed sympathy for the families of the martyrs would get insulted, they would be called traitors and accused of being foreign spies. People became afraid to show even a little bit of sympathy for one another, going against the basic facts of life, the slightest element of what could be called the laws of human nature -- that is, if we indeed agree that sympathy is part of human nature in the first place. Moral and metaphorical murder is being carried out as part of a foolproof plan, idiotic but targeted, stupid yet leaving a mark on people's souls.
”
”
Samar Yazbek
“
As I went out one evening to take the evening air
I was blessed by a blood-red moon
In Lincoln Park the dark was turning
I spied a fair young maiden and a flame was in her eye
And on her face lay the steel blue skies
Of Lincoln Park, the dark was turning
Turning
They spread their sheets upon the ground just like a wandering tribe
And the wise men walked in their Robespierre robes
Through Lincoln Park the dark was turning
The towers trapped and trembling, and the boats were tossed about
When the fog rolled in and the gas rolled out
From Lincoln Park the dark was turning
Turning
Like wild horses freed at last we took the streets of wine
But I searched in vain for she stayed behind
In Lincoln Park the dark was turning
I'll go back to the city where I can be alone
And tell my friend she lies in stone
In Lincoln Park the dark was turning
”
”
Phil Ochs
“
The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other.
The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.
”
”
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
“
Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
”
”
Kwame Nkrumah
“
It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another ‘homeland’ created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing of the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posses an intimate knowledge of the streets of faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small human mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw our grandmothers quarter in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took of their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir.
The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colours, smell, and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows - once the adults had gone out of an evening were their weapons in a battle that had them shirking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror.
The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine.
I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of ’symbols’. Merely symbols, they will not allow us to develop our village so that it shares features with the city, or to move without city into a contemporary space.
The Occupation forced us to remain with the old. That is its crime. It did not deprive us of the clay ovens of yesterday, but of the mystery of what we could invent tomorrow.
”
”
Mourid Barghouti (رأيت رام الله)
“
27And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It xflows with milk and honey, yand this is its fruit. 28 zHowever, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. 29 aThe Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. bAnd the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.” 30But cCaleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” 31 dThen the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” 32So ethey brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and fall the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33And there we saw the gNephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the gNephilim), and we seemed to ourselves hlike grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
”
”
Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.
Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.
Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.
In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.
Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.
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Kristopher Jansma (Why We Came to the City)
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Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
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Hank Bracker