Cory In The House Quotes

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

CORY: You ain't never gave me nothing! You ain't never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I was gonna be better than you. All you ever did was try and make me scared of you. I used to tremble every time you called my name. Every time I heard your footsteps in the house. Wondering all the time...what's Papa gonna say if I do this?...What's he gonna say if I do that?...What's Papa gonna say if I turn on the radio? And Mama, too...she tries...but she's scared of you.

CORY: The whole time I was growing up...living in his house...Papa was like a shadow that followed you everywhere. It weighed on you and sunk into your flesh. It would wrap around you and lay there until you couldn't tell which one was you anymore. That shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you. Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring back at me...hiding under the bed...in the closet. I'm just saying I've got to find a way to get rid of that shadow, Mama.

If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

So considering how the current official religion of China seems to be something like “Stand still while we bulldoze your house to build this dam” it’s hard to put a finger on the relationship between ancient Chinese tales and any specific religion.

I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.” “Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered dish’ person?” “Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.

We had a massive budget shortfall with a structural budget deficit and seemingly no way to close it; the city had been spending at levels way beyond its recurring revenue for years, and the nonrecurring revenue streams were drying up as we entered office, leaving us with no good options. The structural deficit was about $180 million on a roughly $600 million general fund—which meant that if we were to eliminate our debt, we would have to develop or attract new housing and businesses that could generate tax income, identify other sources of revenue, or cut our government by one-third.

The headlights of parked cars shone through the rain, and the sidewalks extended, empty, into the darkness. Underground, the sewers surged like rivers, and a few blocks away, sirens blared. He was no longer aware of his heart or thoughts, only the image of a sunken face staring up from a well, the paleness rising through the water like polished bone. A ringed hand reached toward it, but as the fingers approached, the face would sink away, its eyes opening, closing, and the droplets of red falling like leaves. He was a child running through an autumn cemetery, leaping over cast iron fences, the rain bleeding into the tombstones and the roofs of the mausoleums, his legs following the wings of a crow, flapping to the north. A hedge of withered roses stood between him and his childhood house. He tripped and grazed his cheek on a manhole, his red blooming in the water. The sun set behind the hill; the house turned black—abandoned and derelict—and Chris knew he had to keep running, ahead, into the unknown.

With the mistaken premise that my stay-at-home work and his accomplished career required equal emotional energy, I couldn’t understand where he got the vigor to worry about his ego being rejected or his sex drive being ignored. For me, it was all hands on deck, between our kids and our house and our work. Sex, passion, romance, I thought, could certainly wait. And maybe some part of me reasoned that when I had suffered a loss, he had been too busy to support me. So what could he possibly ask of me now? But now, in the fresh mental air of my momspringa, I start to understand the kind of neglect John must have felt when I fell asleep in one of the kids’ beds every night or stopped kissing him hello and instead threw a preschooler into his arms the minute he walked in the door. At the moment I’m walking in his shoes: my children are cared for by someone else, my days are spent in rich mental exercise, I get plenty of sleep, and I go to the gym every day. In other words, I have the emotional energy to think about desire and how good it feels to be wanted. Yes, John had clean pressed shirts without having to ask, and yes, we had family dinners together that looked perfect and tasted as good, and yes, he never had to be on call when Joe started getting bullied for the first time or when Cori’s tampon leaked at a diving tournament. Yet while I was bending over backward to meet his children’s every need, his own were going ignored. And was it the chicken or the egg that started that ball rolling? If he had, only once, driven the carpool in my place, would I have suddenly wanted to greet him at the door in Saran Wrap? Or was I so incredibly consumed with the worry-work of motherhood that no contribution from him would have made me look up from my kids? I don’t know. I only know that in this month, when I have gotten time with friends, time for myself, positive attention from men, and yep, a couple of nice new bras, parts of me that were asleep for far too long are starting to wake up. I am seeing my children with a new, longer lens and seeing how grown up they are, how capable. I am seeing John as the lonely, troubled man he was when he walked out on us and understanding, for the first time, what part I played in that. I am seeing Talia’s lifestyle choices—singlehood, careerism, passionate pursuits—as less outrageous and more reasonable than ever before. And most startling of all, I am seeing myself looking down the barrel of another six years of single parenting, martyrdom, and self-neglect and feeling very, very conflicted.

Over it all, I kept hearing people shouting out words I couldn’t quite make out. I cornered a woman, young, cornrowed hair that turned into ponytails with blue tips, wearing a bulky old leather jacket and leggings over runners’ legs. “Are you shouting out ‘Hufflepuff’?” As she nodded, I heard an answering call, “Hufflepuff,” and another girl, Latina, sparkly Chuck Taylors and a Ramones/Bernie Sanders mashup tee, emerged out of the crowd and gave the first girl a hug. I realized I could hear others calling “Slytherin” and “Gryffindor” and “Ravenclaw,” and other answering calls, groups self-assembling, hugging, showing their phones to each other, ignoring me. “Excuse me? What is this Harry Potter thing?” The girl grinned at me. “Dumbledore’s Army! It’s how we organize our affinity groups. That way you can always find people to get your back—the houses let us find the kind of people who share our tactics and style.” She tapped an enamel pin on her lapel, yellow and black diagonal stripes. “Don’t worry, we’re trans-inclusive. JKR won’t have a thing to do with us—we keep waiting for her to sue. You want to join? (less)

It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.

The indoor rules were simple: don’t touch anything that wasn’t in your book bag. Did you come home from school, grab a glass, pour yourself some juice, and camp out in front of the TV watching cartoons? Congratulations, Anne of Green Gables, your childhood was fucking rad. We weren’t allowed to touch the glasses anymore after I broke the Hamburglar tumbler from our set of McDonald’s fine china. We didn’t have juice boxes because we were on welfare, and I would rather have chewed tinfoil than recreationally drink powdered milk. We tried to watch TV once, turning it off as soon as we heard Mom’s footsteps on the landing, but technology in the eighties was intent on destroying our flimsy excuses. “Were you watching TV?” Cory and I would give each other the knowing glance of liars everywhere and say, “No.” Mom would then go over, touch the TV, and, feeling the warmth emanating from the screen, rip our story apart in three seconds flat. Disobeying her wasn’t the worst offense—we were wasting electricity, and no parent in the country could abide using electricity for the intended purpose if they were not the ones flipping the switch. When Mom was home, you could fire up every light in the house, leave an empty blender running full speed, and overload every outlet until the fuses popped like fireworks. But children alone were unworthy of electricity, so I guess the expectation was we could spend our time weaving brooms out of hay and banging out candle holders on a tin press. We had to make our own fun, so we invented Spiderweb City.

Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.

It’s funny—Occupy Seneca might have dribbled away on its own if they’d just let us be. People were finding houses, finding schools, getting their lives put back together. We were all in it together at Occupy, all living through our own slow-motion disasters, but the quake itself was the focus of it all. Once the worst of the visible damage had been repaired, the little bickers and ideological differences would have grown into big cracks, widened by the differences in class and race and ability and so on—all the stuff Americans were supposed to be blind to, and which always lurked underneath the bright, fragile surface, the bottomless, ancient depths.

Nehemiah, chapter four, Verse 14: “And I looked and rose up and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, be not afraid of them: remember the Lord which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives and your houses.” Interesting. Interesting that Dad had that verse ready, and that Cory recognized it. Maybe they’ve had this conversation before.

ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).