Jp Quotes

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.

Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do.

A man always has two reasons for what he does--a good one, and the real one.

JP shouted, "TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!" "Um," I said. "We kissed," the Duke said. "That's kinda gay," Keun said. "I AM A GIRL." "Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin," Keun said.

Miscommunication is endless.

Lana says J.P. makes Matt Damon from the Bourne movies look like Oliver from Hannah Montana

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest JP court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal

One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.

My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much.

Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.

Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.

God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.

Well, I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.

Electronic books are a bad thing because they cannot be accumulated on shelves to remind you of your past, to impress your neighbors and colleagues, and to help prevent divorces thanks to the sheer bother of arguing over who owns what.

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand.

A man has two reasons for doing something; a good reason and the real reason.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.

Dear Mr Skully, I have caught my neck in a mangle and will be indisposed for eternity. Yours in death S.D.

Never apologise for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.

True love is sacrifice. It is in giving, not in getting; in losing, not in gaining; in realizing, not in possessing, that we love!

Do you honestly think Lenin is any different from J.P. Morgan? That you, if you were given absolute power, would behave any differently? Do you know the primary difference between men and gods?...Gods don't think they can become men.

It is the last great minute before he walks into your life, but you don't know that yet, can't know. Later, though, you will try to imagine where he was in this exact instant, when he had turned and started to travel toward you, you to him, and how the world around both of you took no notice. Your life would not be the same, but that was all waiting, up in the air, all fate and chance and inevitability.

Sometimes, when you wear a mask too long, you find it sticks to the skin.

I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.

...many atheists embrace Jesus as having been a great teacher, and yet he's the one who had the most to say about hell.

JP Morgan spelled it out: for neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade.

I've long maintained that women are born knowing things it takes men a whole lifetime to figure out. This was simply one more case in point.

When I'm dead, I hope it may be said: his sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking you know who you are.

Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life. I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.

Can I get your cell phone number so we can text like normal antisocial human beings, since we are both too fucked up to have a conversation?

Take deeds Away. Play music please.

Nothing is always. Nothing in the universe is always.

I had loved JP in all of the ways that it’s unwise to love another person. Dido on the pyre. Antony in Alexandria. Bitch in heat.

Life doesn't happen someplace in the future. You said that. You said life happens here and now, and it's a fool's bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.

She does this. Told me JP was cheating on me, trashed my Facebook page-' 'Why?' 'Because she's like that.' 'I thought you two were friends.' 'We are.' 'So how, exactly, do you define the term, "friend"?

Never apologize for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.

You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.

If I were in their place, I’d fall over myself.

Greater than atomic power is the power of love. Alas, we use it so sparingly!

If I had six lives, I would want to spend them with you. Every last one.

Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs.

If you were to force people to do something against their free choice, you would be dehumanizing them. The option of forcing everyone to go to heaven is immoral, because it's dehumanizing; it strips them of the dignity of making their own decision; it denies them their freedom of choice; and it treats them as a means to an end. When God allows people to say 'no' to him, he actually respects and dignifies them.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

You know where the real prison is? It's in your mind. It's in your head.

We all think we have one more good day, but maybe we don't.

Self discipline, punctuality and time management are very important - for life is short, and every resource you have must be well utilized so that you find enlightenment and liberation - your ultimate goal.

Writing: Turning one's worst moments into profit.

I'm starved for love. Not ordinary love but real love. The love that's like music or something.

When your real and congruent with your demeanor and your actions & you do everything with enough conviction: you can get away with anything.

See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.

Learning the difference between God's intervention, the devil's mischief, and PMS can lead to increased happiness.

There’s a difference between what people think they need and what actually fulfills them.

How long will you wait for the right time to come? The right time is now and the right place is here.

Harsh words can cause more wounds than sticks and stones.

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.

But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.

People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.

Because if a woman can't trust the man who said he'd love her forever, who in this world can you trust?

How long will you carry the load of possessions on your head. When will you realise that nothing, no one belongs to you, that you belong to the Lord?

Taken out of context and given a forty-degree twist, you can use the Bible to justify almost anything.

I don't know what it is about this man that makes me melt into a puddle.

No one will go to hell simply because all they needed was a little more time and they died prematurely.

When God is making these judgements, his purpose is not to keep as many people out of hell as possible. His goal is to get as many people into heaven as possible.

The proper thing to do is to admit that hell is real and to allow our feelings of discomfort to motivate us to action.

I wish I were a Russian. It's so exciting.

You are as great as you allow yourself to be.

Triumph belongs to thought. Change your thinking and you change your life! You become new!

If you wish to live in harmony, you must respect every person and, in non-essential matters, yield!

Long has black powder been in the hands of dwarves alone. Alas, winds ever change and nothing remains the same forever. Lord Arrlo Salkeld

An unwise woman once said that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. She was wrong. A truly wise woman knows that the way to a man's heart is through his dick.

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

And Mary, what of other men? There are no other men because my heart has gone out to you. And if you don't laugh I'll tell you what i think. I won't laugh. I think it's a fine instrument that God made for the poor likes of us to enjoy.

Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy.

I hold my feet up and say, “Shoes. Please take off my shoes.” Huxley points at me, then JP, and says, “Go ahead, remove the shoes.” “Why don’t you remove the shoes?” “Because I’m the older brother, which automatically puts me in the managerial role.” “Are you saying you’ll manage how I take off his shoes?” “Yeah, now take them off.” “How about you both take one off?” I say, wiggling my feet.

But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.

If you educate a man, you educate an individual; education contributes to his individual growth; it becomes his ‘private property’, as it were. But when you educate a woman, you educate the entire family!

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He'd never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

That’s what friends are for,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re old friends or new friends. They’re the kind of people who will listen as long as you need them to because, sometimes, telling the story and having someone listen is the only way to figure out how to move on.

There is one type of gambling which should always be encouraged. It is betting on goodness. When a person has wronged you, be good to him. If he adds insult to injury, double the bet. And keep on doubling it. You will surely win!

There’s nothing like a compliment to turn any right-thinking American male into your basic monosyllabic kind of guy.

...this life is the incubation period!

Not perfect, but persistent.

She believed in nothing, if it wasn't for her skepticism she would be an athiest.

If you don't make life fun, then that is no life at all.

Enthusiasm is the greatest asset you can possess, for it can take you further than money, power or influence.

His younger brothers, Allen and Anthony, hadn’t come downstairs yet. Aaron, Allen, and Anthony—their straight As, as his parents had joked before their first A became an F.

I have no time for people who don’t strive to better themselves.

No one worth knowing assumes anything about you.

There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.

It's a fool's bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.

So I made promises to myself, and one was to see as much of the world as I could, to experience as much as I could as fully as I could.

When feelings run deep, and impulses high, it helps to have calm, secure places to retreat to.

God loved me enough to make me aware, at a deep experiential level, of my own pride and sinfulness, and my desperate need for his mercy and continuing work in my life as a believer.

...people in heaven will not be denied the privilege of enjoying their life just because they're consciously aware of hell. If they couldn't, then hell would have veto power over heaven.

I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe, because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act.

Hast du schon mal den Spruch gehört, dass Bücher Orte sind, die man besucht...und wenn man Leute kennenlernt, die dieselben Bücher gelesen haben, dann ist es so, als wäre man am selben Ort gewesen? Wir wissen etwas über den anderen, weil er in derselben Welt gewesen ist wie wir. Wir wissen, wofür er lebt.

Can you please stop talking so I can go back to enjoying Daniel Craig’s outrageously good body?” “That’s so gay,” JP said. “I’m a girl,” said the Duke. “It’s not gay for me to be attracted to men. Now, if I said you had a hot body, that would be gay, because you’re built like a lady.” “Oh, burn,” I said.

In Scripture, faith involves placing trust in what you have reason to believe is true. Faith is not a blind, irrational leap into the dark. So faith and reason cooperate on a biblical view of faith. They are not intrinsically hostile.

Thank ye, miss, I’d like that,’ Elleth said as they passed the green haired woman, who smiled at Elleth with what looked to her like pity. Well, she didn’t need pity now did she? She’d found a life, and a lady she would be. Mamma would be so proud.

I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found. Why do I keep ignoring the place of true love and persist in looking for it elsewhere? Why do I keep leaving home where I am called a child of God, the Beloved of the Father? ”9

Not tingling as much as a rapid-burning desire and longing. I want him to f**k me. Right here. Right now.

MONKEY

Don’t be scared of anything. Trust in the Lord and face the battle of life. There is no power on earth that can lay you low.

...the degree of someone's just punishment is not a function of how long it took to commit the deed; rather, it's a function of how severe the deed itself was.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an athiest.

How when one is able to indulge the luxury of beginning one's life again. All one thinks To do Is end it

Anything that only lives in your head cannot live in the hearts of others.

There was a man Who made a boat To sail away And it sank.

Suicide is something that hangs around forever, dropping load after load of guilt on the living.

Like an old snakebit hound wanting his own cave under a house, I wanted to go home to lick my wounds.

It’s tough going to bed with a stranger. There’s nothing much to talk about the next morning when you wake up.

Respecting others is the biggest discipline.

C'est tout pareil quand on a perdu l'illusion d'être eternel.

Come here till I tell you. Where is the sea high and the winds soft and moist and warm, sometimes stained with sun, with peace so wild for wishing where all is told and telling.

Closure isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be,

The right approach to life is one that hungers to know as many truths as one can and to avoid as many falsehoods as possible.

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are. —John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan

But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.

Lawyers, ah yes, they have courage. But only when it is time to send the bill.

Liebe findet uns, durchfließt uns, zieht weiter.

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.

How do we ever trust each other again, when we both know how good we are at lying?

Maybe it's not the most convnient set of circumstances, but life is always full of glitches, right?

One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious — because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe — some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others — some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal — there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system — that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe him.

But their overall effect was to overemphasize immediate personal conversion to Christ instead of a studied period of reflection and conviction; emotional, simple, popular preaching instead of intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons; and personal feelings and relationship to Christ instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas.

Not using that handy maxim a man is what he makes his dough at and alas how much. Sometimes it is a gentle gesture to remind people of their big time possibilities. Makes them like you.

JP leaned over me to look at the cheerleaders and then shook his head. “It only occurs to me now that I can awkwardly glance at cheerleaders while eating pretty much every day during lunch.

It's not just what substances you put on your skin. Inappropriate inflammation is rooted in diet, how you handle stress, how you rest, and your exposure to environmental toxins. - llskin.jp

Some day you’ll show up when I’m back where I belong in this world. When I have what I ought to have. My due. And when you do. My gamekeepers will drive you out and away for good. Out. Away. Out.

Can you please stop talking so I can go back to enjoying Daniel Craig’s outrageously good body?” “That’s so gay,” JP said. “I’m a girl,” said the Duke. “It’s not gay for me to be attracted to men. Now, if I said you had a hot body, that would be gay, because you’re built like a lady.” “Oh, burn,” I said. The Duke raised her eyes at me and said, “Although JP’s a freaking paragon of masculinity compared to you.” I had no response to that. “Keun is at work,” I said. “He gets paid double on Christmas Eve.” “Oh, right,” said JP. “I forgot that Waffle Houses are like Lindsay Lohan’s legs: always open.

There’s very little distance between love and hate, and often death obliterates the distance between the two entirely. They fuse into a paralyzing turmoil of opposing emotions, one that’s almost impossible to bear.

I would rather commit a sin of commission than a sin of omission, and the evangelical community is exactly the opposite. The evangelical community would rather not do something wrong and the price they're willing to pay for not doing something wrong is they're willing to fail to do something right; they're so afraid of making a mistake. Now the reason they're afraid of making a mistake is they're cowards and our community produces cowards.

The sun of Sunday morning up out of the sleepless sea from black Liverpool. Sitting on the rocks over the water with a jug of coffee. Down there along the harbor pier, trippers in bright colors. Sails moving out to sea. Young couples climbing the Balscaddoon Road to the top of Kilrock to search out grass and lie between the furze. A cold green sea breaking whitely along the granite coast. A day on which all things are born, like uncovered stars.

The current understanding of happiness identifies it as a pleasurable feeling. Pleasant feelings are surely better than unpleasant ones, but the problem today is that people are obsessively concerned with feeling happiness; people are slaves to their feelings. Feelings are wonderful servants but terrible masters. When people make happiness their goal, they do not find it and, as a result, start living their lives vicariously through identification with celebrities.

Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make about reality.

While the Christian faith clearly teaches that believers are to be involved as good citizens in the state, nevertheless, it is obvious why so many secularists are addicted to politics because political power is a surrogate for a Higher Power.

As journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide: It’s become cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Even now, after JP Morgan Chase agreed to a settlement north of $13 billion for a variety of offenses.… the basic principle held true: nobody went to jail. Not one person. (...) On the one hand, he finds, “Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no charges”; on the other, the San Diego County District Attorney’s office conducts 26,000 warrantless, preemptive searches every year to make sure that welfare recipients really are exactly as poor as the poverty bureaucracy demands that they be.

I crushed him to me and was hit with a feeling so incredibly strong that, for a moment, I couldn't breathe. There were aspects of it that I recognized easily - attraction, lust, but there were subtler aspects as well and they weren't as readily identifiable - companionship, longing and comfort. The only way I could describe that undercurrent of emotion, strangely, was ... home.

I think Pecker will be able to sit on my lap, once in the saddle," Gleave said in all seriousness. Correia sighed and moved back through the tavern's rear door. "You're making it too easy for me", Sav said, before following her. "What's wrong with holding Pecker in my lap?" Even Errolas smirked as he limped after the other two, another limper close behind, Pecker at their feet.

The JP preference does show itself in simple and accessible reactions. It serves admirably as the fourth dichotomy if one detail is borne in mind: It deals only with outward behavior and thus points only indirectly to the dominant process of the introvert.

A Christian goes to college to discover his vocation - and to develop skills necessary to occupy a section of cultural, intellectual domain in a manner worthy of the kingdom of God. A believer also goes to college to gain general information and habits of thought necessary for developing a well-structured soul suitable for a well-informed, good citizen of both earthly and heavenly kingdoms.

The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear. 'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.

He is the kindest, gentlest man I have ever met, I'm so mad about him I don't know what to do with myself. Honestly, I don't. I keep telling myself this is nutty, this can't be happening, but then he does something else, something so sweet and thoughtful that it knocks me over again.

She thought too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career.

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others.

I realize something. I haven't had a single flashback or panic attack since I stepped inside the house. It's so cut off from the outside world, so cocooned, I feel utterly safe. A line from my favorite movie floats into my head. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.

After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he had to say. The audience was gone. By Monday, Bear Stearns was of course gone, too, sold to J.P. Morgan for $2 a share.*

A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking—and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market rate. (Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

Oh my God. Oh my God, J.P. is in love with me. And we blew up the school.

It was clearly chiseled by God because Michelangelo couldn't have sculpted something so perfect. And I can't wait to run my tongue over every inch of it.

This time, when I look into his eyes, I see a gleam of mischief. And that's f**king exciting.

You must understand that in the afterlife, our personalities reflect an adult situation anyway, so we can say for sure that there will be no children in hell.

...people will be sentenced in accordance with their deeds...God's justice is proportional. There is not exactly the same justice for everyone who refuses the mercy of God.

What is love but another name for positive reinforcement? —B. F. SKINNER, Walden Two

I can suck the chrome off a bumper and leave the car still standing. In other words, I am sexually gifted, a hero among gay men.

immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.

?Life is like a piece of paper, Ounce you crumble it up it will never be the same.

So, Maximus the Fellatio Trainer — how does your prick feel about scratchy barbarian beards?” Lucius Petronius

Je ne pourrai jamais m'assesoir dessus, c'est une catastrophe: Je suis en bleue clair et il est vert épinard.

I've had too much money to be able to tell who my friends are...

Have you ever been seduced by a ghost? Are you sure about that?

Some days I'd like to start a column about my husband. Then I remember my kids.

I looked at them with the kind of curiosity one reserves for snakes in a zoo.

The first rule for getting out of holes is to stop

People don’t expect you to pay attention to the little telltale clues they leave scattered around them.

I’m not so sure innocence exists anymore.

A child is still one more hope Even in this careworn world.

People die. Quarrels don’t.

Why is it people fall for the wrong person? Then, when the inevitable happens, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get over it.

That’s one of the problems with young people today. No one has bothered to teach them the rudiments of proper telephone etiquette.

You can take the soldier out of the army, but you will NEVER take the army out of the soldier

Be prepared for twists and turns on the road to success.

Big dreams and perseverance are a powerful duo.

Greatness comes from understanding that which cannot be taught.

Said with enough fervor, the word “unbelievable” can convey two diametrically opposed opinions. Something can be either unbelievably good or unbelievably bad, depending on your point of view.

What hell does is recognize that people have intrinsic value. If God loves intrinsic value, then he has go to be a sustainer of persons, because that means he is a sustainer of intrinsic value.

I fear that our inaccurate emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s role in understanding Scripture has become an easy shortcut to the hard work of building a personal library of study tools and using them.

Kristin Neff wisely observes, “When we’re in touch with our common humanity, we remember that feelings of inadequacy and disappointment are shared by all. This is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-pity. Whereas self-pity says ‘poor me,’ self-compassion remembers that everyone suffers, and it offers comfort because everyone is human. The pain I feel in difficult times is the same pain that you feel in difficult times.”4

Although Ryan hardly knew the person whose breath was playing over his cheek any better than he had mere seconds before, the simple exchange of names—or initials—had raised the bar for the encounter from anonymously seedy to merely impulsive. He’d always admired impulsiveness, though he’d never successfully cultivated the tendency in himself. Impulsive people seemed to get what they wanted. And if not, they looked like they had a lot of fun trying.

Like parents who split up in the aftermath of a child’s death, because the grief would only be survivable with someone who didn’t feel the same pain as you, whose agony didn’t reflect yours every time you looked into their eyes.

In all the heroic tales, dying soldiers saw their lives pass before their eyes. No, Martin realized. The memories were just running like rats from a sinking ship, down the ropes only to drown. He watched the backs of their heads.

Indeed, for all of history there has never once been an adventuring group worth its salt that didn’t have some amount of lunacy to go around, and neither the gods nor the Stones nor the adventurers themselves would have it any other way.

Miss Frost, sometimes I feel fifty three. Seldom, but at times, I feel twenty. Like the days. Ever feel a Saturday on a Tuesday? Or a week of one Friday after another? Recently I've been seventy. But I remember thirty four as a fine age.

While forgiveness is an important part of the gospel, the good news goes beyond that. It amounts to the claim that the kingdom of God—the direct availability of God himself and His rule—is now available to anyone who will enter it through trust in Jesus.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and ajury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

time to time, someone will tell me something so patently unbelievable that I manage not to understand the words as they’re spoken. This usually leads to my blathering something incredibly insensitive or incongruous which makes me look like a tremendous jackass. This was one of those moments.

The gospel of the kingdom is an invitation to a different reality, a different way of living. The kingdom is a new way of relating as people. Where ordinary human life is based on competitiveness and defensiveness, domination and subjugation, treachery and violence, the kingdom is based on the self-giving love of God.

One other important footnote to history: On Sunday, March 16, the same day that JP Morgan Chase announced its purchase of Bear Stearns and the Fed announced its approval of the deal, the Fed’s Board of Governors created the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. The PDCF made it much easier to lend money to securities firms by, for example, broadening the range of eligible collateral. Bear executives maintained that they could have averted bankruptcy without requiring assistance, if they had been given access to the PDCF. Jimmy Cayne told the FCIC that the PDCF came “just about 45 minutes” too late to save his firm. No one will ever know.

One of the biggest mistakes a man can make is to work too goddamned much. First you drank so much it got you in trouble, and now you're gonna work so much it'll be the same damn thing. Society ain't as hard on workaholics as it is on the other kind, but it's still just as bad for you in the long run, just as hard on your system,

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies. Yet he was a little bit of each - poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a 'three-bottle' J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessnes, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection - self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")

And so, as the passengers drifted off to sleep to the rhythmic clicking of steel wheels against rail, little did they dream that, riding in the car at the end of their train, were six men who represented an estimated one-fourth of the total wealth of the entire world. This was the roster of the Aldrich car that night: Nelson W. Aldrich, Republican "whip" in the Senate, Chairman of the National Monetary Commission, business associate of J.P. Morgan, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Abraham Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury; Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, the most powerful of the banks at that time, representing William Rockefeller and the international investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Henry P. Davison, senior partner of the J.P. Morgan Company; Benjamin Strong, head of J.P. Morgan's Bankers Trust Company;1 6. Paul M. Warburg, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, a representative of the Rothschild banking dynasty in England and France, and brother to Max Warburg who was head of the Warburg banking consortium in Germany and the Netherlands.2

Psychologist J.P. Guilford, who carried out a long series of systematic psychological studies into the nature of creativity, found that several factors were involved in creative thinking; many of these, as we shall see, relate directly to the cognitive changes that take place during mild manias as well. Fluency of thinking, as defined by Guilford, is made up of several related and empirically derived concepts, measured by specific tasks: word fluency, the ability to produce words each, for example, containing a specific letter or combination of letters; associational fluency, the production of as many synonyms as possible for a given word in a limited amount of time; expressional fluency, the production and rapid juxtaposition of phrases or sentences; and ideational fluency, the ability to produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements in a limited amount of time. In addition to fluency of thinking, Guilford developed two other important concepts for the study of creative thought: spontaneous flexibility, the ability and disposition to produce a great variety of ideas, with freedom to switch from category to category; and adaptive flexibility, the ability to come up with unusual types of solutions to set problems.

But there’s mounting evidence that many successful CEOs and politicians are actually psychopaths, too; or at least, fall somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum—that is, they score low on tests for remorse, conscience, and moral judgment, and high for fearlessness, quick thinking, and cold-bloodedness. And there are certain psychopathic traits that we know Miles has. Something called shallow affect, for example—having a very limited range of emotions. Getting bored easily. Impulsiveness. Charm. Not really caring about other people’s feelings, except as a tool to manipulate them by. Having very few long-term friends. Seeing life as a contest where, for you to win, others have to lose. And treating your children as trophies, flattering extensions of yourself.

Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana. Parking near the edge of woods and walking out into the sunny rows of corn, waving seeds to a yellow horizon. She wore a white blouse and a gray patch of sweat under her arms and the shadow of her nipples was gray. We were rich. So rich we could never die. Ginny laughed and laughed, white saliva on her teeth lighting up the deep red of her mouth, fed the finest food in the world. Ginny was afraid of nothing. She was young and old. Her brown arms and legs swinging in wild optimism, beautiful in all their parts. She danced on the long hood of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her, I thought that God must be female. She leaped into my arms and knocked me to the ground and screamed into my mouth.

If Churchill had looked harder, he would have seen that England’s ‘highest position’ was very tenuous. Apart from her dead sons, the balance of events had swung heavily against her. Not least, his country was hugely in debt. By 1917, the British were paying most of the cost of the war not only for themselves but for their allies: half of Belgian and Serbian, two-thirds of French and Russian, and all of Italian war expenditure was funded by London. In return, London depended more and more on the money loaned by Washington and Wall Street, in particular the great bank of J.P. Morgan, and victory found the British in the excruciating position of having to repay the immense debts they owed, with little hope of recovering the debts owed them, or in the Russian case no hope at all.

To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people—brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their own reports—at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets. Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front—though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren’t nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men. “But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human