Graffiti Wall Quotes

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.

Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.

Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall.

Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.

I escaped onto the wall, a painted ghost trapped in a jar. I stood back to look at it and I knew the sad thing wasn't that the ghost was running out of air. the sad thing was that he had enough air in that small space to last him a lifetime. What were you thinking, little ghost? Letting yourself get trapped like that?

The cream-tiled walls were spattered here and there with old dried bloodstains, deep gouges that might have been clawmarks, and all kinds of graffiti. As usual, someone had spelt Cthulhu wrongly.

Some spray-painted graffiti on the wall asks, Is it nothing to you all who pass by? Lamentations 1:12 and I think, No, Lord, whoever the hell You are, this is not nothing to me. This counts.

I was here but now I'm gone I left my name to carry on Those who liked me Liked me well Those who didn't can go to hell'" -The bathroom wall

Blank walls are a shared canvas and we're all artists.

His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest.

Most times I look at Shadow and Poet's work, I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls

Behind every successful woman is a man who tried to stop her. - Graffiti on the wall of the women’s lavatory, the George Tavern, East London

I can't believe you're still mad at me," Ed says. "You grabbed my arse." "You broke my nose." "You broke his nose?" Jazz asks. "You grabbed her arse?" "It was two years ago-" "Two years, four months, and eight days," I tell him. "-and I was fifteen, and I slipped and she broke my nose." "Wait a minute. How do you slip onto someone's arse?" Jazz asks. "I meant slipped up. I slipped up and she broke my nose." "You're lucky that's all I broke," I say. "You're lucky I didn't call the police." Leo, Dylan, and Daisy slid into the booth. "Did you guys know that Lucy broke Ed's nose? Jazz asks. Ed closes his eyes silently and bangs his head on the wall.

Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

the usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of themselves behind in fluorescent paint.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

I am no blank slate for love to write on. My heart has walls marred with cracks, bloodstains, and bullet holes; graffitied over by past lovers.

There's one near Hoover Street Station. A picture of me, grass growing out of my heart while I'm talking to her. She looked at the wall but she didn't see us.

The old jukebox was playing one of Wild Bill’s favorites, Nat King Cole’s, “Smile”—so I knew I was in the right place. I paused a moment to listen to the words, blinking back tears. Intuitively, I knew Wild Bill wouldn’t want to see Sam crying, so I headed to the phone affixed to the wall, pretending to be chatting up an old friend. My fingers traced graffiti on the walls, phone numbers, and hearts with initials engraved inside. Gathering my emotions, I waited for the song to end.

Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.

I can't tell Beth about me being Shadow. She'd get uptight about me doing something she thinks is dangerous." That's not why you won't tell her. You won't tell her because what's on that wall is what's going on in there." He tapped my head.

Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

Enjoy the war,' read the graffiti left on Berlin's walls. 'The peace will be terrible.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

I read the graffiti written on the walls of my brain. Then I use my writing to give it voice so it won't simply be "whispered in the sounds of silence." (Apologies to Paul Simon)

There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explain who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off.

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.’ ‘What an extraordinary poem. Ruth Zardo?’ ‘Leonard Cohen. Clara used it in her piece. She wrote it on the wall behind the three of you, like graffiti.

It isn't the smallness of this place that bothers me. It's the grey that's worked its way into the walls. It's the stains on the carpet from some other life that came and left before ours. Bert always said he'd give me a good deal on paint but some places take burning down and rebuilding to make them shiny." -Ed, page 10

Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want To Be.

[Graffiti] gets erased and painted over, and maybe it's even more beautiful because we know it won't last.

Do you ever hear from your dad?’ I ask. ‘Uh-uh. Mum said they had the biggest fight before he left. She was sixteen and telling him about me and he left a dad shaped hole in the wall.

Dum walks backwards, talking to us. “We’re going back to high school where our survival instincts are at their finest.” “If you get the urge to graffiti the walls or beat up your old math teacher,” says Dee, “do it where the birds can’t see you.

The people who run our cities don't understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit, which makes their opinion worthless. They say graffiti frightens people and is symbolic of the decline in society, but graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers. The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you're never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.

It's true we all build imaginary prisons for ourselves. Believe that we are trapped behind the invisible bars of the lives we have somehow carelessly constructed for ourselves, despite our youthful promises to ourselves. We see adults who are stagnant and miserable as we grow up. They graffiti the walls behind them with their mistakes and we swear secret oaths that we will heed those warnings. We’re much too clever, we know all the shortcuts and the back alleys.

Did you know that on one of the islands of Orkney, in the North of Scotland, there are some runes that when translated turned out to be Viking graffiti? Eight feet up a wall it says "A tall Viking wrote this." You gotta love that.

The internet is the world’s biggest men’s bathroom graffiti wall. A perfect and frictionless outlet for insanity.

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don’t think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues.

He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome.

The walls of her stall were covered with graffiti. If it had been funny (“Pull here for MFA Degree” right below the toilet paper dispenser) she would’ve stayed longer, but it was mostly weird random names and dates.

I'm up for a Shadow hunt." She tries to let us out, but the lock's stuck. "That's weird." "Is this like an omen?" Daisy asks. Jazz unzips her boot and takes it off so she can slam it at the lock. "It's not an omen." Slam. "Tonight." Slam. "Is going to be great." Slam. "I've got a feeling." Slam. She puts her book back on and looks at us. "Okay, we'll have to climb out of here." She stands on the toilet seat and from there to the toilet-roll holder and then heaves herself over the wall. "Impresive," I say, and then we hear her slam to the ground. "Less impressive," Daisy says. "It doesn't mean anything," Jazz calls. "Trust me. I'm a psychic.

We don’t, not any of us, get to this point clean. No. We’re all dirty and ragged. Rough edges and sharp corners. Fault lines and demolition zones. We’ve got tear gas riot squads aiming straight for the protest lines of our weary souls. Landmines in our chests that we trip over every time we try to hide from the terrifying tremble of our own war torn hearts....But it is your history that delivered you this roadmap of scars. Those healed wounds and their jagged edges are proof of your infinite ability to survive, to knit broken back to wholeness, to refuse that the end is every really the end... Make friends with your teardown. Do not run from your bar brawl for forgiveness. Sit with the times you’ve fucked up and the times you lost all and the days your redemption was delivered by the hand of the last person you ever expected to give anything but darkness. And through it all know that your walled up and torn down, graffiti-covered heart is still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

yesterday’s graffiti on a council wall became today’s rant on Facebook.

However, if he really wanted to bust me, all he had to do was ask to see my schoolbooks. The front and back covers are the first place graffiti artists start to draw.

as had the graffiti spray-painted in red on one of the corridor walls: THE CAKE IS A LIE.

The wall in the room we shared will remind them that we were here. That we are human. Of value. Important.

The wall was a symbol of protests, inch upon inch covered with graffiti, in red, blue, yellow, purple, indigo, magenta, terracotta, a tableau of screaming indignations.

Walls tagged with graffiti (one such piece of tagging: a stencil of a familiar Sith Lord’s helmet with the phrase beneath it reading VADER LIVES).

The walls were covered with graffiti and William passed the time correcting the spelling

Our children will be told what Israel has done.’ graffiti on the Wall in Bethlehem, opposite Aida refugee camp, 2008

I wanna spray this fucking wall with cum graffiti.

He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: ‘A police state is a country run by criminals’.

After the disastrous 1962 China war, a patriot wrote this graffiti on a wall, ‘Krishna Menon is a fool.’ He was hauled up in court and sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment—one year for defacing public property and fourteen years for letting out state secrets!

The worst of the graffiti in Bassey Park – much of it coolly logical anti-gay statements such as KILL ALL QUEERS and AIDS FROM GOD YOU HELLBOUND HOMOS!! – was sanded off the benches and wooden walls of the little covered walkway over the Canal known as the Kissing Bridge.

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

And lots of graffiti jotted on the walls of the men’s room, almost all of it the sort a fellow like Emory W. Light could really relate to: I LIKE TO SUK BIG FAT COX. BE HERE AT 4 FOR THE BEST BLOJOB YOU EVER HAD. REEM OUT MY BUTT. And here was a gay poet with large aspirations: LET THE HOLE HUMAN RACE/JERK OFF ON MY SMILING FACE.

Virus writers are, sociologically, not much different from taggers who spray cryptic symbols on walls, or even the “unofficial” graffiti artists: they feel (or say they feel) justified in doing their work, and have a wanton disregard for the dignity and property of others. They feel not mere justification, but pride in what they do.

Volga drops from her place on the wall to join me. She moves excitably, still young enough to be impressed by this. Dano hops along the columns back to the arch, where he graffities profanity with his laser drill. “The razor?” I ask. He twirls it in his hand. It’s meant for a man twice his size. “A nasty little dick tickler.” “The razor,” I say again. “Course, boss.” He flips it to me casually. I snag it out of the air. Its handle is too big for my hand. Real ivory exterior and inlaid with gold filigree. The rest is brutally economical. In whip form it coils like a thin, sleeping snake. Eager to be rid of it, I shove it in a foam carry case and tuck it into my pack. “All right, kids.” I open the canister of custom acid and tip it onto the marble floor. “Time to go.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

I remember that,” I said. “The character of Sol—the old scholar whose daughter has been aging backward—he discovers that love was the answer to what he had called The Abraham Dilemma.” “I remember one nasty critic who reviewed the poem in our capital city,” chuckled Father Glaucus, “who quoted some graffiti found on a wall of an excavated Old Earth city before the Hegira—‘If love is the answer, what was the question?’ 

When I feel lonely, I scroll through Tinder and remind myself what I’m missing. Which is dudes with coconut-oiled beards all posing next to the same graffitied wall in Dumbo with profiles written entirely in emojis. And I remember that I’m not lonely. I’m alone. When I’m comatose from writing and mothering, when I’m hurting too badly to cook, talk, or smile, I curl up with ‘alone’ like a security blanket. Alone doesn’t care that I don’t shave my legs in the winter. Alone never gets disappointed by me.” Eva sighed. “It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in.” “Are you speaking metaphorically,” asked Cece, “or are you dating a man named Alone?” “You can’t be serious.” “My doorman is a SoundCloud rapper named Sincere. One never knows.” “I like being single,” Eva continued quietly. “I don’t want anyone to have to really see me.” They sat in silence, Eva idly snapping the rubber band on her wrist.

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn’t a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer.

Why Isn't It All More Marked? Why isn’t it all more marked, why isn’t every wall graffitied, every park tree stripped like the stark limbs in the house of the chimpanzees? Why is there bark Left? Why do people Cling to their Shortening shrifts? So Silent. Not why people are; Why not more violent? We must be So absorbent. We must be Almost crystals Almost all some Neutralizing chemical That really does Clarify and bring peace, Take black sorrow and make surcease

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as Death to the aristocrats! and The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood! and May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends! All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form.

Syria, the March 2011 arrest and torture of fifteen schoolboys who had sprayed anti-government graffiti on city walls set off major protests against the Alawite Shiite–dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad in many of the country’s predominantly Sunni communities. After tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and mass arrests failed to quell the demonstrations, Assad’s security forces went on to launch full-scale military operations across several cities, complete with live fire, tanks, and house-to-house searches.

It was in this last job that Osman formed most of his convictions about his fellow human beings. No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and seen the things that people did, simply because they could – destroying the water hose on the wall, breaking the door handle, drawing nasty graffiti everywhere, peeing on the hand towels, depositing every kind of filth and muck all over the place, knowing that someone else would have to clean it up.

Every generation comes to a point where they claim the end of the world has got to be just around the corner. I was in my mid-thirties, certain and confident it was just a matter of time. Things were coming to a head: rising gas prices, increased backward leaps in racism, segregation, political angst, infringement on nearly every point of the Constitution by the president, and just an overall sense of angry people. It was hard not to read the graffiti on the walls around us. If you couldn’t see it, if you didn’t sense it, then I guess you were just a blind motherfucker living under some rock.

Block of Death. Just inside the door on the left is the room where they held the proceedings. Jarek remarks that the SS officer who sentenced five thousand Poles here to die was still alive last year, living in Germany, age ninety-two. We ask why. He shrugs. At the far end on the corridor, on the left, looking out into the courtyard, is the room where the condemned were stripped and held. An illustration depicts a naked girl holding on to her mother’s legs as the SS guard comes for them. High on the wall, a prisoner scratched graffiti, a name and the date and the words, “Sentenced to die.” Beneath that is the date of the next day and the words, “I’m still here.

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft.” PROLOGUE The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar. This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats. First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility. Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful. Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama. Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for. Cosita would become a Drone!

Cesca sipped from her coffee cup as she peered through the windshield into the darkness. Rain was falling hard on a San Francisco she didn’t recognize from her own universe, or from her time in the other Matt’s universe. The real darkness here had nothing to do with night. This San Francisco mirrored the moral corruption and decay of the society which inhabited it. She and Ariel had been here two days, scouring streets filled with perversion and hopelessness; alleyways inhabited by the homeless and mentally ill; sex shops catering to every perversion imaginable and unimaginable; sidewalks teeming with drug addicts and male prostitutes — some dressed as women; street corners inhabited by once lovely young women prematurely aging from selling their bodies to all takers — male and female; children of both sexes, from as young as seven and eight, dressed by pimps to attract pedophiles who cruised this part of the city nightly. Many of the children would be sold on the spot, never to be seen again. Sun-faded and now graffitied wall mosaics of galvanizing yet transient political cult personalities, erected by their blinded followers centuries ago, marked this alternate world’s gradual slide into an ethical, and finally moral abyss, from which it had never crawled out. "God, I can’t believe this is San Francisco,” whispered Ariel from the seat next to Cesca. “I feel like I need to run a bar of soap over my soul.

In a test of the theory, Kees Keizer of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands asked whether cues of one type of norm violation made people prone to violating other norms.39 When bicycles were chained to a fence (despite a sign forbidding it), people were more likely to take a shortcut through a gap in the fence (despite a sign forbidding it); people littered more when walls were graffitied; people were more likely to steal a five-euro note when litter was strewn around. These were big effects, with doubling rates of crummy behaviors. A norm violation increasing the odds of that same norm being violated is a conscious process. But when the sound of fireworks makes someone more likely to litter, more unconscious processes are at work.

You’re going to get an F.” Spencer shifted the papers on his school desk and looked for a hundredth time at the graffiti in the corner. Last year’s occupant of the desk must have spent hours etching the message into the wooden surface. Dummy, Spencer thought. Couldn’t even spell cabbage. Truth be told, Mrs. Natcher did smell a little like cabbage sometimes, but she was still tolerable. Today, however, a strong Bath and Body Works fragrance filled the sixth-grade classroom and Mrs. Natcher was nowhere to be seen. In her place was a thin, younger woman who had short, stylish hair streaked with pink highlights. She wore high-heeled red shoes and a skirt so short that Mrs. Natcher would have croaked. Turned out that Mrs. Natcher had croaked—well, almost—which was why Miss Leslie Sharmelle had been called to Welcher Elementary that morning. Spencer glanced at the clock on the wall.

A girl who is a writer… A girl who is a writer. She’s a woman who lives in her head because the voices of the characters who reside there are ever present demanding their voices be heard. A girl who is a writer. She’s the girl with a cup of coffee and a plate of food that has gotten cold because she couldn’t stop telling the story. A girl who is a writer. She’s the one who lives in a coffee stained flannel shirt but you won’t mind because it’s you who brings her the addiction that fuels her word count. A girl who is a writer. You’ll share her with the world and they will see parts of her naked soul, but you won’t mind because it’s who she is, not what she does. A girl who is a writer. She’s the one who dips her quill in the blood stains of her pain and splatters it on the world’s wall of graffiti filled artists. Her voice will stand out because she is a girl who is a writer. © Suzanne Steele

Here’s the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that’s affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he’s not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant.” “How long?” someone yelled. Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.” “Why can’t you get him to leave?” “Because I can’t, that’s why,” Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. “Because I’m not Superman, all right? Look, he’s inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can’t get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?" Silence. “Yeah, I thought so. I can’t get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake.” “That’s your job,” Zil said. “Oh, I see,” Sam said. The resentment he’d held in now came boiling to the surface. “It’s my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What’s your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don’t know how we’d ever manage without you.” “Sam…,” Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning. Too late. He was going to say what needed saying. “And the rest of you. How many of you have done a single, lousy thing in the last two weeks aside from sitting around playing Xbox or watching movies? “Let me explain something to you people. I’m not your parents. I’m a fifteen-year-old kid. I’m a kid, just like all of you. I don’t happen to have any magic ability to make food suddenly appear. I can’t just snap my fingers and make all your problems go away. I’m just a kid.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he had crossed the line. He had said the fateful words so many had used as an excuse before him. How many hundreds of times had he heard, “I’m just a kid.” But now he seemed unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Look, I have an eighth-grade education. Just because I have powers doesn’t mean I’m Dumbledore or George Washington or Martin Luther King. Until all this happened I was just a B student. All I wanted to do was surf. I wanted to grow up to be Dru Adler or Kelly Slater, just, you know, a really good surfer.” The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public. “I’m doing the best I can,” Sam said. “I lost people today…I…I screwed up. I should have figured out Caine might go after the power plant.” Silence. “I’m doing the best I can.” No one said a word. Sam refused to meet Astrid’s eyes. If he saw pity there, he would fall apart completely. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.

You look terrible,” was Ron’s greeting as he entered the room to wake Harry. “Not for long,” said Harry, yawning. They found Hermione downstairs in the kitchen. She was being served coffee and hot rolls by Kreacher and wearing the slightly manic expression that Harry associated with exam review. “Robes,” she said under her breath, acknowledging their presence with a nervous nod and continuing to poke around in her beaded bag, “Polyjuice Potion . . . Invisbility Cloak . . . Decoy Detonators . . . You should each take a couple just in case. . . . Puking Pastilles, Nosebleed Nougat, Extendable Ears . . .” They gulped down their breakfast, then set off upstairs, Kreacher bowing them out and promising to have a steak-and-kidney pie ready for them when they returned. “Bless him,” said Ron fondly, “and when you think I used to fantasize about cutting off his head and sticking it on the wall.” They made their way onto the front step with immense caution: They could see a couple of puffy-eyed Death Eaters watching the house from across the misty square. Hermione Disapparated with Ron first, then came back for Harry. After the usual brief spell of darkness and near suffocation, Harry found himself in the tiny alleyway where the first phase of their plan was scheduled to take place. It was as yet deserted, except for a couple of large bins; the first Ministry workers did not usually appear here until at least eight o’clock. “Right then,” said Hermione, checking her watch. “She ought to be here in about five minutes. When I’ve Stunned her—” “Hermione, we know,” said Ron sternly. “And I thought we were supposed to open the door before she got here?” Hermione squealed. “I nearly forgot! Stand back—” She pointed her wand at the padlocked and heavily graffitied fire door beside them, which burst open with a crash. The dark corridor behind it led, as they knew from their careful scouting trips, into an empty theater. Hermione pulled the door back toward her, to make it look as though it was still closed. “And now,” she said, turning back to face the other two in the alleyway, “we put on the Cloak again—” “—and we wait,” Ron finished, throwing it over Hermione’s head like a blanket over a birdcage and rolling his eyes at Harry.

The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around. The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants’ love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children. “And people live here,” Grave Digger said, his eyes sad. “That’s what it was made for.” “Like maggots in rotten meat.” “It’s rotten enough.” Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall. “Anybody can come in here day or night,” Grave Digger said. “Good for the whores but hard on the children.” “I wouldn’t want to live here if I had any enemies,” Coffin Ed said. “I’d be scared to go to the john.” “Yeah, but you’d have central heating.” “Personally, I’d rather live in the cellar. It’s private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat.” “But you’d have to put out the garbage cans,” Grave Digger said. “Whoever occupied that whore’s crib ain’t been putting out any garbage cans.” “Well, let’s wake up the brothers on the ground floor.” “If they ain’t already awake.

If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The

The ability to die without regret: to savour those final moments as a warrior, in the knowledge that you were surrounded by other warriors. He remembered a piece of graffiti he’d once seen on the walls of a gladiator school – A sword in my hand and a friend by my side – and for the first time realized its true meaning. ‘It could have been different,’ he said. ‘You could have been a hero on Mona and I could be drinking wine in Rome.’ Lunaris looked into the orange-tainted darkness around him. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Some were popular sex symbols: graffiti from the first century AD have been found on walls in Pompeii—one Thracian gladiator was “the maiden’s prayer and delight” and “the doctor to cure girls.” Their images appeared on pots and dishes.

He changed his final wad up at the train station. Which was a sad place now. There were homeless people and disturbed people hanging around. There were furtive men with swivel eyes, their hands thrust deep in capacious pockets. There was spray-can graffiti on the walls. Nothing compared to the South Bronx or inner-city Detroit or South-Central LA. But unusual for Germany. Reunification had been a strain. Economically, and socially. And mentally. He had watched it. Like living a comfortable life in a nice little house with your family. And then a whole bunch of relatives moves in. From someplace where they don’t really know how to use a knife and fork. Ignorant and stunted people. But German like you. As if a brother had been taken away at birth and locked in a closet. Then in his mid-forties he comes stumbling out again, pale and hunched and blinking. A tough situation to manage.

I speak for the mongrel, the mestizo, the half-breed, the bastard, the alley cat, the cur, the hybrid, the mule, the whore, the unforeseen strain that pounds against all the safe and disgusting doors. I speak for vitality, rough edges, torn fences, broken walls, wild rivers, sweat-soaked sheets. Who would want a world left mumbling to itself, a perfect garden with the dreaded outside, the fabled Other held at bay and the neat rows of cultures and genes safe behind some hedgerow? I dread a world that is all Iceland, the people fair, their genealogies stretching back in a dull column for a millennium, their folkways and mores and lifeways and deathways all smug and pointless. I speak for graffiti.

SOLOMON’S LAWS 1. Try not to piss off a cop unless you have a damn good reason . . . or a damn good lawyer. 2. The best way to hustle a case is to pretend you don’t want the work. 3. When arguing with a woman who is strong, intelligent, and forthright, consider using trickery, artifice, and deceit. 4. A prosecutor’s job is to build a brick wall around her case. A defense lawyer’s job is to tear down the wall, or at least to paint graffiti on the damn thing. 5. Listen to bus drivers, bailiffs, and twelve-year-old boys. Some days, they all know more than you do. 6. When the testimony is too damn good, when there are no contradictions and all the potholes are filled with smooth asphalt, chances are the witness is lying. 7. A shark who can’t bite is nothing but a mermaid. 8. When the woman you love is angry, it’s best to give her space, time, and copious quantities of wine. 9. Be confident, but not cocky. Smile, but don’t snicker. And no matter how desperate your case, never let the jurors see your fear. 10. Never sleep with a medical examiner, unless you’re dead. 11. If you can’t keep a promise to a loved one, you probably aren’t going to keep the loved one, either. 12. Life may be a marathon, but sometimes you have to sprint to save a life.

I admired Bolden’s abilities. I’ve long thought that a good prosecutor is a well-trained union carpenter building a sturdy house with shiny tools and freshly hewn wood. She follows blueprints to the letter, makes sure the framing is in plumb, lines up the two-by-fours, and hammers the nails straight. The best courtroom carpenters are Renaissance men and women. They double as bricklayers, installers, tapers, finishers, electricians, and even plumbers. They can build the whole damn house, and it’s a thing of beauty that will pass the toughest inspection by city inspectors . . . or juries. Until the defense lawyers come along. We’re the stealthy vandals wielding crowbars and spray paint. We tear down door frames, break windows, and spray graffiti on the walls. Our job is to destroy what the carpenters have built and feed it into the woodchipper.

He didn’t get the message that I messed with Glenna. No one else. He drew a dick on her locker and wrote “Dobbs slobbers knobs” under it. The dumbass got the wrong locker section. Not number. Not row. He was on the wrong damn floor of the building. I beat his ass in the parking lot after the game in front of everyone, and on Monday, my boys made sure he scrubbed the graffiti clean before first bell.