Inland Empire Quotes

The humiliation of their arms and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine made a sore pull on the endurance of this sensitive people; and their hearts are still hot, not so much against Germany as against the Empire. 

An idea, a notion, love, hate, formed in childhood, was hard to redirect because it was so ingrained and so accepted as normal.

haboobs, those nasty walls of sand and dust that moved in like dense clouds, making travel, and even breathing, near impossible.

Unless a person’s memory could be erased, there were no fresh starts, only progression. Even if you burned down a house where bad things had happened, the house would still be there in your mind, regardless.

The mage leaned both hands on the table, scanning the charts splayed out on its surface. There was a map there, showing a land he could not recognize: a ragged coastline of fjords studded with cursory sketches of pine trees. Inland was a faint whitewash, as of ice or snow. A course had been plotted, striking east from the jagged shoreline, then southward across a vast ocean. The Malazan Empire purported to have world maps, but they showed nothing like the land he saw here. The Empire's claim to dominance suddenly seemed pathetic.

Just outside of Greater Los Angeles, in a town called Claremont, are five colleges—Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont Mckenna. At the start of the Great Panic, when everyone else was running, literally, for the hills, three hundred students chose to make a stand. They turned the Women’s College at Scripps into something resembling a medieval city. They got their supplies from the other campuses; their weapons were a mix of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles. They planted gardens, dug wells, fortified an already existing wall. While the mountains burned behind them, and the surrounding suburbs descended into violence, those three hundred kids held off ten thousand zombies! Ten thousand, over the course of four months, until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified.

People wondered what it was about California that produced so many serial killers. It had the inauspicious distinction of having more serial kills than any other state, and also some of the most notorious killers. Maybe it was just a numbers thing—California was a big state and had the highest population. Or maybe earthquake tremors and fault lines had people subconsciously on edge. It was especially perplexing considering how much sunlight the state got; it was sold and embraced as the land of happy

high percentage of serial killers with the middle name of Wayne. Someone had even gone to the effort of keeping a running tally, and so far there were 223 killers on the list.

Proponents of “the Wayne Theory,” as it was known, had determined that 0.41 percent of convicted murderers had the middle name of Wayne.

and understand that the world is made up of all kinds of beauty, even in places that at first seem harsh.

I’m more worried about evil people than I am about a major earthquake.

Nothing good came in a suit. You had your funeral directors, your FBI, your lawyers, your detectives.

Abuse came wrapped in different packages, and indifference to a partner’s pain was one of them.

Curiosity and the ability to be amazed were essential for them both right now. When those responses slipped away, a person was in trouble. Awe was part of the human experience that couldn’t and shouldn’t be discounted.

The Roman invasion of Britain in 43 CE imported the full pantheon of pagan gods and goddesses. In 313 the emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of the new Holy Roman Empire. In the ensuing trickle-down across Europe, Christianity emerged in the British Isles as one cult among many – a largely Celtic brew of beliefs seasoned by the sporadic invasions of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Missionaries kept returning to Britain’s Celtic fringes – Cornwall, Wales, Ireland – but inland, where it was more perilous for them to penetrate, the divine family tree became gnarled and tangled, with the pagan gods twisted around the Christian Trinity as an ivy binds itself to an oak. The story of the death of Christ was, in any case, mystically aligned with the older religion, with its depiction of a sacrificed saviour king and the ritual consumption of body and blood. Paganism may have rejected the pantheon of state-sanctioned gods, but it grafted itself firmly onto the Christian gospel.

I wanted to someday know the code of her elegance and precision and genius, the prose I admired so much, but I wanted to read about my dreamers in their smog-shrouded pale asphalt streets, in their orange groves where the white blossoms fell around us like stars when the sun was going down, in their canyons where the gods of the mountains, like Tahquitz, waited for revenge, in their silver-hot vineyards and the date groves of Mecca where dark men cut grapes and put paper bags around the date clusters. And now it is here. Inlandia.

On this same line, huge San Bernardino Valencias found their way to the 1884 World's Fair in New Orleans, where they attracted crowds. No one could imagine oranges grown in the western United States. It was then and there, more or less, that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began.

In one day you can sit under the trees in a thin dress and be too warm if the sun is at its best, and then be half frozen two hours later if the wind is in earnest and the sun has retired. In the sun, Paradise; in shade, protect yourself!

glowed in the pulsating, never-final twilight there, at that execrable conjunction of gasoline and desert air ~ At Barstow, Charles Tomlinson

Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story. ~ Joan Didion, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

That might be the story of Riverside. Tying to fit in with the big boys by accommodating their oversized posteriors. ... That's how we say it. We say, 'This is a horsey area.' ... That means go slow. We have feed stores and tack shops and desert, a really beautiful desert. It's the desert that has me here in 909. Technically, the Badlands is chaparral. The hills are filled with sage, wild mustard, fiddleheads and live oaks. Bobcats, meadowlarks, geckos, horned lizards, red tailed hawks, kestrels, coach whip snakes, king snakes, gopher snakes. Rattlesnakes and coyotes. We don't see rain for seven months of the year and when we do we often flood. In the spring, the hillsa re green. They are layered and gorgeous. This is in contrast to the rest of the year when the hills are brown and ochre and layered and gorgeous. ~ 909, Percival Everett

hundreds.

It was harder for beautiful people like him to get old because they had so much further to fall and so many adjustments to make, going from a world where things came easy because you were so damn dazzling, to a world where you had to fight to prove you were even average.

There weren’t any self-help books for the children of serial killers. It would have been an extremely niche market. Hopefully.

Like a magician, he produced something else, a small scrap of fabric.

He theorized three things were necessary for a subject to become a serial killer. One, an aggressive gene he called the warrior gene. Two, inactivity or damage or malfunctioning of the temporal and frontal lobes, which could be determined in a functional MRI. And three, early abuse that took place right after birth.

The warrior gene, a prefrontal cortex that didn’t respond to stimuli . . .” He clicked keys and pulled up several colorful brain images. “No activity in the area that controls morality.

During the study, we researched serial killer genealogy going back to the 1800s. The other thing we now know—or think we know, because more research needs to be done—is that this behavior clusters in families.” “Inherited.

mothers were the stronger carrier of the gene,

She could feel a dark cloud creeping over her brain, closing things off, protecting her.

Living in the city changed the biological clocks of birds. City birds got less sleep than rural birds.

She’d moved away, to cities out east, but now she was back, and she wondered how she could have possibly forgotten her love of the place. On her good days, the scent of desert flowers and creosote bush was all the therapy she needed. On her bad, it was still a steadfast reminder that the landscape had been a comfort yesterday and would be again tomorrow. Sometimes she couldn’t help but feel she’d been a terrible friend, abandoning a place that had meant so much to her at one time. And yet the desert didn’t seem to care about her thoughtlessness. It remained the same, continuing to turn sunrises orange and sunsets red. It continued to sit quietly under fast-moving clouds and thunderstorms while allowing the wind to carry its sand away, lifting the grains high, taking them far

Mojave Desert was the biggest killing field in the United States.

body finder. It looked a little like a baby stroller. The device rolled across the ground and used ground-penetrating radar to find the bones.

Almost two hundred adults a month were reported missing in the county alone, over forty thousand a year for the entire state. Even after limiting it to adults only, it would take time to come up with a list of possible victims.

San Bernardino County was the largest county in the contiguous United States, which meant policing was a challenge and getting from point A to point B was time-consuming.

she managed to ask while at the same time wanting to get up and run away, cover her ears, not hear his words.

she could also have been one of the people who voluntarily vanish every year in California.

Van Tassel lived underneath a seven-story rock and communicated with aliens there. Doesn’t ring a bell?” She fed him more information. “They told him to build something called the Integratron that was supposed to make a person young again. Does any of this sound familiar?” “They don’t teach outsider history in school.” “He spent twenty-four years creating this wooden dome that has no nails in it, but he died before he finished so he was never able to rejuvenate himself.

Joshua trees don’t grow anywhere else in the whole world, sweet little bird,” her grandmother had told her. She always added the sweet when she called her little bird. “That’s how special they are. You should never climb on one or pull their branches. You can sit in their shade, but don’t hurt them. They only grow a fraction of an inch a year, so they’re very old and very wise. And the only way more Joshua trees can grow is with the help of the yucca moth.

Joshua trees love books,” her grandmother said. “And they love to be read to.

Sometimes facing the thing you fear can render it powerless.

you have to learn to feel in a different way. You have to change your focus from near to far, like opening a camera’s depth of field. You have to look at the sky and not at the ground. And once your brain finally makes the change, you’ll see it, really see it, and understand that the world is made up of all kinds of beauty, even in places that at first seem harsh. Places where the absence of trees and shade and things that are physically close allows the mind to expand, to see in a new and different way.

Joshua trees looked like people,

There was no starting over for most people. That was a misconception. Unless a person’s memory could be erased, there were no fresh starts, only progression. Even if you burned down a house where bad things had happened, the house would still be there in your mind, regardless.

Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Ray and Faye Copeland, Fred and Rosemary West.

People still said that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” even though the Commonwealth was starting to come apart. In spite of the obvious, it was unthinkable that the United States had a colony in Africa; well they had one, and that was where I was headed! World War II had been over for ten years and in Europe they were getting on with things and for now all was well in Africa, and with the World! Unless especially fitted out, aircraft didn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic in one jump, so after leaving Idlewild Airport in New York City, we flew halfway across the Atlantic Ocean to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria in the Azores. After refueling and stretching our legs we continued on to Lisbon. Our layovers were only for as long as it took to take care of business. There were no days built in, for me to have a leisurely, gentlemanly, civilized journey to my destination. Instead my seat was beginning to feel as hard as a rock pile. The engines continued to drone on as the Atlantic Ocean eventually gave way to the Iberian Peninsula. My view of Portugal was only what I could see from the air and what was at the airport. Again we landed for fuel in Lisbon, and then without skipping a beat, headed south across the Mediterranean to the North African desert. The beaches under us, in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara, were endless and the sand went from the barren coastal surf inland, to as far as the eye could see. With very few exceptions there was no evidence of civilization.

On a napkin she’d created a black-ink version of the painting she’d been daydreaming about, the place where her father had buried a woman named Carmel Cortez.

People could force themselves to change, basically stuffing a square peg into a round hole, but the core person usually remained the same.

They might try for a while, but most of the time people defaulted back to the person they were comfortable with, the one who took the least amount of effort. Being a better person was work.

People always left a little of themselves behind once they were gone.

In June 1842 the British fleet entered the Yangtze. The Chinese were ready to receive their enemy, having assembled a considerable fleet of sixteen war junks and seventy merchant men and fishing vessels requisitioned for naval duty. In the forts of Woosung, near the mouth of the river, they had placed 253 heavy artillery pieces. The Chinese also unveiled a secret weapon: paddle-wheelers armed with brass guns, gingals, and matchlocks, and propelled by men inside the hull operating treadles. Nin Chien, governor-general of Nanking, wrote of them: `Skilled artisans have also constructed four water-wheel boats, on which we have mounted guns. They are fast and we have specially assigned Major Liu Ch'ang to command them. If the barbarians should sail into the inland waterways, these vessels can resist them. There is not the slightest worry.`23 The battle of Woosung was swift. The British ships of the line soon silenced the guns of the forts. The Nemesis, towing the eighteen-gun Modeste, led the fleet into the river, firing grape and canister at the Chinese crafts, which fled. The Nemesis and the Phlegethon thereupon chased the fleeing boats, captured one junk and three paddle-wheelers, and set the rest on fire.

But even the most boring people could harbor deep and ugly secrets.

First the monsters come, then the indifference.

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By probing the full sequence of the London plague for the very first time, geneticist Johannes Krause and his team unearthed the evolution of Yersinia pestis [the Plague microbe], and the genomic tracks of its terrible journey. An earlier study had shown that, just like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death in the 1340s had also originated in China. With a publicly available database of the full sequence, the history and the genetics can be aligned. Over a five-year period we can track a course from Russia to Constantinople, to Messina, to Genoa, Marseille, Bordeaux, and finally London. All these ports acted as points from which radiation of the plague could crawl inland. En route, it claimed the lives of some 5 million people. Just as in the Byzantine Empire 600 years earlier, wave after wave of outbreak crashed into Britain’s population in the centuries after the fourteenth, and it was only after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that this pandemic was crushed. Krause’s work also shows that it never really went away. The pandemic might have ended, but the strains of Yersinia that cause bubonic plague outbreaks to this day are identical.