Firefighters Quotes

When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires

Once, in second grade, Kate drew a picture of a firefighter with a halo above his helmet. She told her class that I would only be allowed to go to Heaven, because if I went to Hell, I'd put out all the fires. ~Brian Fitzgerald

As she’d left, I’d glanced at her gun. This time, when she’d pointed it at me, she’d flicked the safety on. If that wasn’t true love, I don’t know what was.

The elevator doors opened, and Ranger stepped out and spied Tank stretched out on the carpet. "Fainted," I said. Ranger walked to Tank and stood hands on hips, staring down at him. "Tank doesn't faint. I've been in firefights with him. He's a rock." "Well, the rock fainted.

I hadn’t been a nerd, mind you. I’d just been the type of guy who spent a lot of time by himself, focused entirely on a single consuming interest.

Don’t do anything stupid." "Don’t worry," I whispered over the line, "I’m an expert on stupid." "You’re..." "Like, I can spot stupidity, because I know it so well. The way an exterminator knows bugs really well, and can spot where they’ve been? I’m like that. A stupidinator." "Never say that word again," Prof said.

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.

We want what we can’t have, even when we have no right to demand it.

I needed to say something. Something romantic! Something to sweep her off her feet. "You’re like a potato!" I shouted after her. "In a minefield." She froze in place. Then she spun on me, her face lit by a half-grown fruit. “A potato,” she said flatly. “That’s the best you can do? Seriously?” “It makes sense,” I said. “Listen. You’re strolling through a minefield, worried about getting blown up. And then you step on something, and you think, ‘I’m dead.’ But it’s just a potato. And you’re so relieved to find something so wonderful when you expected something so awful. That’s what you are. To me.” “A potato.” “Sure. French fries? Mashed potatoes? Who doesn’t like potatoes?” “Plenty of people. Why can’t I be something sweet, like a cake?” “Because cake wouldn’t grow in a minefield. Obviously.” She stared down the hallway at me for a few moments, then sat on an overgrown set of roots. Sparks. She seemed to be crying. Idiot! I thought at myself, scrambling through the foliage. Romantic. You were supposed to be romantic, you slontze! Potatoes weren’t romantic. I should have gone with a carrot.

His body came home, but his soul had been devoured in the firefight of a godless desert.

My name is David Charleston. I kill people with super powers.

That’s an answer in the same way that ketchup can be hair gel.

Reckoner Super Plan for Killing Regalia... Step One: find Regalia, then totally explode her. Lots and Lots. Step Two: put Val on decaf. Step Three: Mizzy gets a cookie.

You can’t immerse yourself in something,” Prof said softly, “without coming to respect it.

Outside has everything. Whenever I think of a thing now like skis or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos, I have to remember they're real, they're actually happening in Outside all together. It makes my head tired. And people too, firefighters teachers burglars babies saints soccer players and all sorts, they're all really in Outside. I'm not there, though, me and Ma, we're the only ones not there. Are we still real?

In spite of having the personality of a horny jackrabbit with ADD, Salvatore was an excellent firefighter and paramedic.

As picky as a woman with her shoes,” Abraham grumbled. “Hey,” I said. “That’s insulting.” I knew plenty of women who were pickier with their guns than they were with their shoes.

I’m a firefighter, Ellie. I do the saving in this relationship.

If there was a universal law regarding mankind, it was that they’d find a way to ferment anything, given time.

I wasn’t a nerd, mind you, but I’d spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I’d had limited experience with social interaction. I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils.

Marry me he said voice full of emotion. Be my soul mate my friend and my lover as long as we both live. Make babies with me that have curly hair and big brown eyes. Grow old with me and we'll watch the sun set together in the evenings. And when I leave this world I'll be happy knowing I was the best man I could be for having loved you.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

I also suspected he was on the cover of the Denver Firefighters calendar, picture used for the month of July, he was that hot. If the firefighters merged with the police officers and they did a group shot that included Lawson and Jury, the paper might spontaneously combust.

I needed to say something. Something romantic! Something to sweep her off her feet. "You're like a potato!" I shouted after her. "In a minefield.

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.

The two great constants of life. Food and death.

Thank you. For being willing to talk. For not turning me in. For... being you.' 'I'm pretty good at being me,' I said. 'I've had all these years to practice--I hardly ever get it wrong these days.

I could have been a bomb-disposal expert, or a volunteer for the Mars mission, or a firefighter, or something safe and sensible. But no, I had to be an historian.

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we've been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.' Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.

It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Even officers who don't approve of your lifestyle choices would still take you as backup over Kirkland, or most anyone else. They'd say how you're bad for shaking up with vampires and wereleopards, but in a firefight they'd take your vampire-loving, furry-fucking ass over most anyone else's.

If your hero is a firefighter, your heroine better be an arsonist.

Out of the firefight, into the carbon freeze." -Anakin Solo

Or, you know, you could interview the perfectly willing Epic walking beside you.” I coughed into my hand. “Well, um, this scheme may have started because I was thinking about how to rescue you from your powers. I figured if I knew how long it took, and what was required to hold an Epic … You know. It might help you.” “Aw,” she said. “That has to be the sweetest way someone has ever told me they were planning to kidnap and imprison me.

Well, trust me,” I said. “I’m more intense than I look. I’m intense like a lion is orange.” “So, like … medium intense? Since a lion is kind of a tannish color?” “No, they’re orange.” I frowned. “Aren’t they? I’ve never actually seen one.” “I think tigers are the orange ones,” Mizzy said. “But they’re still only half orange, since they have black stripes. Maybe you should be intense like an orange is orange.” “Too obvious,” I said. “I’m intense like a lion is tannish.” Did that work? Didn’t exactly slip off the tongue.

I’m going to destroy you, little man!" Sourcefield yelled after me. "I’ll rip you apart like a piece of tissue paper in a hurricane!" "Wow," I said, reaching an intersection and taking cover by an old mailbox. "What?" Tia asked. "That was a really good metaphor.

I sense a very large but.” “Funny, because right in front of me, I see a—” “Watch it.

You had a package. It was torn, so I looked in.” She lifted one of a stack of firefighter calendars, with his own mug and half-naked body on the cover. “Nice,” she said, a ghost of a smile crossing her lips. “Mr. 2008.” He bit back a sigh. “It’s for charity.” “And you definitely contributed.

Stupid water, ruining my enjoyment of swimming.

I let out a sound that was definitely not a whimper. It was something far more manly, no matter what it sounded like.

Where there are villains, there will be heroes. Just wait. They will come...

The innovative leader has to be an arsonist and a firefighter.

A firefighter’s job is hours of boredom, seconds of terror.

Standing out like a punk guitarist in a mariachi band.

Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.

like our parents always told us not to like firefighters warn against we're playing games and making the rules up as we go we're matching warmth to warmth starting fires burning wishes into our skin we're hidden holding forbidden lights we're children whose fathers have never taught never touch but we're finding these new flames we smother at the sound of footsteps.

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras… We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.

Our department takes 1,120 calls every day. Do you know how many of the calls the public expects perfection on? 1,120. Nobody calls the fire department and says, 'Send me two dumb-ass firemen in a pickup truck.' In three minutes they want five brain-surgeon decathlon champions to come and solve all their problems.

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Discomforting, like finding a three-week-old sandwich behind your bed, when you swore you’d finished the darn thing.

It felt odd to be laughing during a firefight. Then again, if you can’t laugh when you’re about to die, when can you?

The sudden and abrupt removal of my all-consuming goal … well, it was like I was a donut, and somebody had sucked all the jelly out of me. But I could stuff new jelly in there. It would just get my hands a little sticky in the process.

Do I have to ask what you're smiling about?" From the driver;s seat if the Mustang, Zack cut a glance at her, grinning like a fool. "Same thing you are, Mighty Phallus." --Zack to Cori after a morning of good lovin'.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

Enforcement had done its best to kill me on several occasions. You didn’t just get over something like that. In fact, they had killed Megan. She’d recovered. Mostly.

Everyone from firefighters to sushi chefs who are experts in their fields can enter the mainstream conversation taking place on myriad media channels to voice their opinion’s and talk about their expertise.

Good-bye Holmes. It… hasn’t really been a pleasure. But thank you for the information. Be careful to keep out of prison. Unless you want an upgrade to your current living conditions, then I wish you the best.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

It takes guts to walk into a burning building or staunch an arterial bleed—no question. But it also takes a special kind of brain. Firefighters think differently from other people, and this is especially true of me. Because when everybody else is panicking, when the entire whole world is freaking the heck out—that’s when I get calm.

It’s more common for people to get fire tattoos. Symbols of passion, transformation, change. But I wanted smoke because it’s what remains. After the fire, after everything is destroyed, you’re left with smoke and ash. You’ve gotta make somethin’ out of it.

I had to stop him from arresting an old lady who let her dog urinate against the fire hydrant that was in front of Burgerville headquarters. "You'll blow our cover." "But what if there is a fire?" "The fire department will come and put it out," I said. "With what?" "Water," I said. "Not from that hydrant," Monk said. "It's inoperable." "No, it's not," I said. "It can still be used." "There is urine all over it," Monk said. "no fireman would dare touch it, nor would any other human being." "Firefighters run into burning buildings," I said."They aren't going to care about some dog pee on a fire hydrant." "They would if they knew," Monk said. "We should call and warn them. Call Joe right now. He can get the word out faster than we can." "Every fire hydrant in the city has dog pee on it, Mr. Monk. It's how dogs mark their territory. I can guarantee you that every male dog that has passed that hydrant has pissed on it." He looked at me, wide eyed, "No." "It's what dogs do," I said. "The firefighters knows this." Monk swallowed hard. "And they still use the hydrants?" "Of course they do." "They are the bravest men on earth," Monk said solemnly.

What?” The corner of his mouth turned up, his white teeth gleaming in the light. “Just thinking how hot you are.” He scoffed and playfully rolled his eyes. “Thanks—but aren’t all firefighters hot? I mean, we do basically live in fire.

Oh, thank you, I thought, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. Dancing was stressful—but murderous demigods, those I could deal with.

A party. What was I going to do at a party? I had a feeling I'd have been much better off in the water with the sharks.

Faith in technique is the religion of the dangerous trades. To go up against an armed felon in a gunfight or to fight him in the dirt you have to believe perfect technique, hard training, will guarantee that you are invincible. This is not true, particularly in firefights. You can stack the odds in your favor, but if you get into enough gunfights, you will be killed in one.

The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the po­lice and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

Suddenly, Kat turned to face him again. “Oh, and Howard?” “Yes?” “FYI—my number is listed.” With her parting shot, she sashayed off, hips swinging, leaving him with his mouth hanging open. Slowly, a big, sappy grin spread across his face.He scores! Nothin’ but net.

I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I’d make a great bullfighter or firefighter—anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I’m on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions.

Brodie found herself frowning in confusion, the rugged handsome one was making no sense. “But I just want to have sex with you… no commitment, no sharing. If anything, I would prefer it if you didn’t talk at all, before, during, or after the act.

As accurate as a blind man pissing during an earthquake.” “Wow...,” I breathed. She frowned at me. “That was a great metaphor,” I said. “Oh please.” “I need to write that down,” I said, ignoring her complaints, fishing for my new mobile to type it out.

It had been like discovering that Santa Claus was secretly a Nazi.

What else will we do?" I asked, turning to leave. "This is the only plan we have." "This isn't a plan," Prof said. "It's hormones.

I know what it’s like to be different. I’m a Native American in a white world.

The strong do not wallow. They move forward.

Sometimes strength rested not in resistance, but in the release of arms against a foe of one’s own creation.

Come to the Dark Side.” Killian deepened his voice. “We have spreadsheets.

I couldn’t help grinning at the sight of her. Megan, in turn, raised a nine-millimeter square at my chest. Well, that was familiar, at least.

If we stop helping people because we’re afraid, or ambivalent or whatever, then we lose. Let them do evil. I’ll stop them.

Some things just work. There is elegance in simplicity.

The baby hiccupped then farted. James laughed. Best wingman ever, and he couldn't even talk.

Harper Broussard was the one for him. But he knew she didn't know that yet.

My brother talks about car accidents the same way I talk about family. I don’t know when he learned to forgive. I don’t remember teaching him that. I don’t remember learning it myself. His life’s ambition is to be the man my father never was: to step up to the plate, to grow into a firefighter’s uniform or ride shotgun in an ambulance. I am still stuck on the bathroom floor with my resentment.

The nurse stared at him with such shock, it was clearly the first time anyone had not provided her with a safe, supported, emotionally aware and nurturing, micro-aggression-free educational platform.

I see the Divine in the mountains, the rivers, the clouds and the stars. I see the Divine in the highways, and skyscrapers, in farmland and playgrounds. But where is the Divine in the barren desert, in burned-down forests, and disaster-stricken towns? The Divine is in the oasis, and the people there who give water and rest to desert travelers. The Divine is in the firefighters’ tools, and the flowers that bloom from the ash. The Divine is in relief trucks, bringing food and water and comfort. The Divine rests in all things, but is no more awake than when we summon strength to do what is right.

Six-Pack didn't despise George W. Bush to the degree that Ketchum did, but she thought the president was a smirking twerp and a dumbed-down daddy's boy, and she agreed with Ketchum's assessment that Bush would be as worthless as wet crap in even the smallest crisis. If a fight broke out between two small dogs, for example, Ketchum claimed that Bush would call the fire department and ask them to bring a hose; then the president would position himself at a safe distance from the dogfight, and wait for the firemen to show up. The part Pam liked best about this assessment was that Ketchum said the president would instantly look self-important, and would appear to be actively involved--that is, once the firefighters and their hose arrived, and provided there was anything remaining of the mess the two dogs might have made of each other in the interim.

Falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Falling is easy. Staying that way is hard. But I’ve been choosing hard all my life, so why the hell would the life I make with the woman who completes me be any different? I love you like a madman. You’re the air I breathe, my next heartbeat, and I’m never letting go.

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

extreme zombie fighting” kit. Tactical boots and tacticals. Firefighting bunker gear. Nomex head cover tucked under the collar of the bunker gear. Full face respirator. Helmet with integrated visor. Body armor with integral MOLLE. Knee, elbow and shin guards. Nitrile gloves. Tactical gloves. Rubber gloves. Assault pack with hydration unit. Saiga shotgun on friction strap rig. A .45 USP in tactical fast-draw holster. Two .45 USP in chest holsters. Fourteen Saiga ten-round 12-gauge magazines plus one in the weapon. Nine pistol magazines in holster plus three in weapons. Kukri in waist sheath. Machete in over-shoulder sheath, right. Halligan tool in over-shoulder sheath, left. Tactical knife in chest sheath. Tactical knife in waist sheath. Bowie knife in thigh sheath. Calf tactical knife times two. A few clasp knives dangling in various places. There was the head of a teddy bear peeking out of her assault pack.

Our guns go from safe to single shot to full auto, which is nice and linear and logical, but they (Russians) knew that would mean ninety-nine times in a hundred their guys would panic and ram the selector all the way home, and thereby fire off a whole magazine on the first hasty and unaimed shot. Which would leave them with an empty weapon right at the start of a firefight. Which is not helpful. So the AK selector goes safe, then full auto, then single shot. Not linear, not logical, but certainly practical. Single shot is a kind of default setting, and full auto is a deliberate choice.

Wildland firefighters do not enjoy the cultural prestige that structural firefighters do. They do not wax their fire engines and cruise down the local parade route, lights flashing; they are not the subject of countless popular books and movies; major politicians do not honor their sacrifices on the Senate floor or from the Rose Garden; they do not have bagpipe bands, fancy equipment, enduring icons, or other signifiers of honor verifying the importance of their activity.

Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…

When relationships have outlived their shelf life, people often realize that at some level, they are sticking it our because they once thought in the light of their divine love that the other person would change. Sorry for breaking the poetic hope here, but that doesn't happen. People are like rubber bands. They may be able to stretch from time to time and do some amazing things, but in general they are who they are. If manipulation and machinations on your side get them to behave the way you want, I will set my clock on the fact that they will return to their previous way of behaving, or they will keep faking it. To be in a relationship with someone who is not really there doesn't make sense. People who aren't cooperating feel like a project to us, like something for us to rescue or fix. Rescuing is the province of firefighters and fairy tales, but it's not real life. The stance of sticking it out in hopes of redemption is an old story and one that has wasted many lives.

She’d been seconds away from kissing the man… no, throttling him, for his sheer audacity.  “You expect me to bat my eyes and thrust my tits into some hairy creature’s face and then run away like a giggling simpleton?” “They only have the one eye under all that hair, and their eyesight is notoriously bad, so you can probably just keep your… tits where they are. 

Think of the fire-fighting dragon, Yato-san. Even if nobody ever really pays attention to it, they all feel safer just because it's there. I think that's all we gods are. But if that's enough to give people peace of mind... then maybe we can make the world a slightly better place. Because the one who truly save people... are people.

Having said that, I'll give the two of you my full blessing and support--provided you're not yanking her around," she advised, addressing Sean. "I'm not, I swear." "Good. Because if I find out you are? I'll cut off your balls and use them as Christmas ornaments. We're clear?" "Mama!" He nearly choked on a bit of pie. "Crystal." Amelia graced him with the full force of her angelic smile. "Fantastic. More pie?" -Eve's Mama

I hadn’t realized that this whole “water” thing was going to be an issue for me. I mean … half the world is water, right? And we’re all half water to boot. So stepping into the sub should have felt like a sheep falling into a big pile of cotton. Only it didn’t. It felt like a sheep falling into a pile of nails. Wet nails. On the bottom of the ocean.

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn’t go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child’s face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

The [ military ] lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished and well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I'd been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.

Watching him walk over, Alex mused that Eli Cooper was the sort of man who knew how to use his physicality. Beneath his handmade shirts and tailored suits, a street fighter hummed through every loose-limbed motion. But that impression did not extend to his face, which was structurally perfect. Skyscraper-high cheekbones. Superhero jaw. A mouth that should have a government warning. There were no signs of past trouble with a jealous husband or an abandoned girlfriend. No one had ever broken his nose. No one had busted his lip. Strange, because her first instinct on seeing him was to roundhouse kick him into the next millennium.

She should pull away, even though she had begged for it with her smart mouth. She should punish him for every crime he’d perpetrated. For being too good-looking, too sexy, too everything. But the kiss was like him—just too damn good. Warm and brutal, providing answers to questions she never knew she had. He teased with his tongue along the seam of her mouth, seeking that last nudge of acceptance as if it was his God-given right. She parted her lips, and like a predator hinged on her threshold, he took.