Langley Quotes

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. - Wizard

Now I know I've got a heart because it is breaking. - Tin Man

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

How can you talk if you haven't got a brain? I don't know, but some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.

So let me get this straight. You left this ‘fabulous job’ as you put it, so you could be a dog-sitter in Fort Langley?

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

Burns hummed, meeting Ty's eyes and trying not to smile. "You want the CIA to believe that you mistook your partner for your prisoner, handcuffed him, and delivered him to Langley?" Ty shrugged. "I mean...he grew a beard. It was an honest mistake." Burns nodded. "Fair enough.

Me, a tease? I am not. I put out...thank you very much. - Jamie Killian

What a world, what a world. Who would have thought that. some little girl like you could. destroy my beautiful wickedness. - Wicket Witch of the West

So, do you clean, too?” “Hell, no!.. I’m gay ... not a damn housewife!” Everybody laughed. (The Tin Star)

I swore I'd never become some lord's brainless arm ornament and political host, but I've become far worse. I'm a glorified housekeeper and sperm donor. -from the journal of Payton Marcus Townsend.

The officer looked at her. “So, to recap, you carried a package of, you don’t know what, for a girl you’ve never seen before and gave it to a man you don’t know. Or so you say. Who does that?

Nerd Girl Problem # 235 That unexplainable crush you have on fictional characters.

...and remember my sentimental friend that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.

Going so soon? I wouldn't hear of it. Why my little party's just beginning. ~ Wicked Witch of the West Wizard of Oz

Not only did I manage to accidentally meet the man I’m investigating, I managed to accidentally have sex with him.

If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there.

Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody.

Sometimes there is naught you can do for a man, save stand quietly beside him and believe. (Advice to Felicity Langley from her Nanny Rana)

What's first?" He took another swig. "I don't know. You're the one fucking this chicken. I'm just holding it's wings.

In a daze, Remi stepped up to the battered old bar, next to Rhys. "What will it be?" the bartender asked Remi. "I'll have a Jake and Coke-uh, Jack and Cock, uh-" Oh fuck. Remi stopped talking. He could actually feel his face heat with a blush. Someone shoot me.

You psychotic little Georgia Peach.

I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.

Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

I haven't always been a patient man...but something tells me you'd be worth the wait.

Can I have Jake and Coke--uh, Jack and Cock

Hollindrake once wrote to me that the men who fight for a cause, a noble one, have more honor than any mere gentleman. – Felicity Langley (heroine)

Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I'm sure he knew it as well. It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme that kept his mind in the mood he liked to be in.

Fiction with its big question of 'what if?' is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Once upon a time, the ability to light a fire was fictitious.

A thing of beauty, like an approaching storm. It was hard not to respect, even though you knew it was likely to erupt any moment.

The notion that the lobby at Langley is choked with the corpses of former agents gunned down by their own colleagues at the behest of genocidal directors on the top floor is amusing but wholly unreal.

Not incidentally, the Langley project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money, whereas the brothers’ total expenses for everything from 1900 to 1903, including materials and travel to and from Kitty Hawk, came to a little less than $1,000, a sum paid entirely from the modest profits of their bicycle business.

Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, there's no place like home.

...I got to chase my dream for a while, see what it's like, but this—" He stood and swept his arms wide. "This, and my family, is worth any price.

- had a million things to do today; death would have to wait, - (The Tin Star)

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.

He'd made a complete ninny of himself. Wentworth probably thought he'd never been kissed before. Which couldn't be farther from the truth. Colton had been kissed at least three times just last season.

Some of her last words to me, Mason, were 'I believe in fate and I believe you were supposed to walk into my life, so Mason could walk into yours.” I know she can’t be wrong.

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.

...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself." -Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928.

I'm Homer, the blind brother.

She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.

Friends are the balm that soothes the heart. – Nanny Tasha (former nanny to Felicity and Tally Langley)

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.

'That another one of your rules, Bit? No touching, no kissing, no flirting?' 'You forgot no calling me Bit.' 'Yeah, I don't like that one. I don't think I like the no flirting either.'

Prologue Summer, 1962 MARSH MCKITTRICK’S BUICK WAS passed through the gates of the vast Government complex outside Langley. He eased onto the turnpike, then sped toward Washington, touching his briefcase nervously and looking into the rearview mirror. Two cars filled with heavily armed guards followed closely. Sanderson Hooper beside him and Michael Nordstrom in the rear seat remained speechless.

Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America’s imaginative engagement with my nation.

So you and the lovely Agent Scully are going down to investigate?' Frohike said, sounding hopeful. 'Yeah, we leave for Cancun tomorrow.' 'Our tax dollars at work,' Langly snorted. 'I'd love to see Agent Scully with a healthy tropical tan,' Frohike said. 'Down, Frohike,' Mulder said.

As long as I am on this little planet I expect to love a lot of people and I hope they will love me in return.

With a hand on the back of his neck, Raleigh pulled him down until their foreheads touched. “I love you. I want to suffocate you in your sleep with your pillow sometimes, but I love you.” Steven chuckled and nipped Raleigh’s full bottom lip. “I love you too, Cony.” Running his fingers through the back of the thick black hair, Steven urged Raleigh forward. “Please don’t murder me in my sleep.” Their lips met.

Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment

[On the subject of Heath Ledger's Joker] This character who attracts psychotic henchmen may have lingering symptoms from his own past psychosis. He keeps making involuntary, repetitive movements—flicking his tongue, smacking his mouth—which suggest tardive dyskinesia, a condition that arises as a consequence of long-term or high-dosage use of antipsychotic (neuroleptic) medication.

That shit only works out in movies, Langley. Real life doesn’t happen like that. Real life is about your job, and how you provide for yourself and your family. And you know what? Real life doesn’t give a shit about love. We’re on our own for that.

Sickos never scare me. At least they’re committed.” —Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer)

It did not occur to him that anything would go wrong until it positively had gone wrong.

Here is your law enforcement and media question of the day: Was the TV show COPS real or BS? It might have been real incidents, but it wasn't really all that real. They edited the episodes to make it appear as if black people were committing fewer crimes. That is what the show creator John Langley said in a 2009 interview in response to people who were unhappy his long-running reality show, COPS, was showing too many black people getting arrested. What irritates me sometimes is critics still watch and say, 'Oh look, they misrepresent people of color.' That's absolutely not true. To the contrary, I show more white people than statistically what the truth is in terms of street crime..It's just the reverse. And I do that intentionally, because I do not want to contribute to negative stereotypes, said Langley, the show's producer, in 2009.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.

No other society in the history of the world has searched so long for a meaningful cultural identity and failed in its quest as has America, the land of You Are What You Do.

Remi groaned, grabbing his face in both hands. 'Goddamn it! I'm sick and fucking tired of my eyes shifting.' He dropped his hands and pointed to Jonathon's body. 'And that is just gross. Why do I want to eat it?' He stormed off toward the house.

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

Society is primarily concerned with appearances… and this is why it tends to be highly deluded. Deeper understanding will often give you a very different perspective than that held by the majority.

She liked to scatter hope," Minerva said, taking his offering. "Pardon?" "Snowdrops. They represent hope. The first flowers in the spring. Hope for a new beginning." She took a sniff of the delicate blossoms and then shyly glanced over at him. "Perhaps you were meant to be here today. To find your hope.

If you do choose to take action to help others, make sure you do it with no expectation of positive response from them. Do it because the act feels right. This will keep you from making more of a mess of the situation and your emotions.

Some people are crazy all the time; All people are crazy sometimes.

He is like Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had gone mad and vowed to speak in only the most convoluted terms meant to confound his listeners.

I can’t be 100 per cent sure about the whole death thing as I’m still here,

WHAT? YOU AGAIN?' he shouted in capital letters.

The Langleys and the Ardens enjoyed a symbiosis that came naturally to parasites sharing a common host - the public purse.

We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

When I was a kid, I just read and read. We were lucky enough to have gone to England and had a whole bunch of Penguin Puffins books, like The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, which is hilarious. I would love to be able to write a book like that, but I don't know that I have a humorous bone in my body when it comes to writing. Once on a Time by A.A. Milne. I read a lot of old, old fantasy stuff. The Carbonelbooks by Barbara Sleigh. Then when I got a little older I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I was a big fan of romance and when I got a little bit older I would read a Harlequin romance or a Georgette Heyer novel and then David Copperfield, and then another genre book and then Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was that kind of reader. One book that I loved was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I loved voice and that book had it in spades. And then of course I grew into loving Jane Eyre.

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

I do karate because it makes the rest of life easy. That is to say, karate training, if done properly, is tough: it’s hard work, with little reward because your sensei never compliments you.

My parents may never recover from the trauma of having to ask me to put my hacking skills to good use after dissuading me from using them all these years. —from the journal of Payton Marcus Townsend

The closed doorway to Mr. Langley’s homeroom, once so intimidating, has no effect on me now. I shove it open and storm inside, tardy and fully prepared to take on anyone who has a problem with that.

All around the edges of the platform where she sat, elephants stood patiently waiting for their breakfast. Occasionally, one would grunt or snort or flap its ears, but otherwise, they were as quiet as apparitions.

But no matter their [carousels] colors, the horses all go at the same speed as they circle round and round. They start together. They finish together, too. Nobody is first and nobody is last. Everyone is equal when you ride a carousel.

When her boy went missing the cops did the searching and while they searched only rumors reached her. All she could do was wait. When they found her baby’s body, she let Richard arrange the funeral. When they tried his killer, her name wasn’t on the case. The state’s was. Louisiana v. Ricky Langley. Like that was whom he’d harmed. At the trial the prosecutors told her where to sit, and she sat there. They practiced with her what to say, and she said it. Your own son dies and it becomes the community’s tragedy, as though it’s the system’s tragedy. Public.

I thought about addiction. It was a high that you were always chasing, something that you need as desperately as your next breath, something that consumes you entirely for better or for worse. For my father, it was gambling. For Victoria, it was worrying. And for me, it was Alexander Langley.

Hardly anyone in Washington or at Langley yet saw the full significance of bin Laden and al Qaeda. When President Clinton signed Executive Order 12947 on January 23, 1995, imposing sanctions on twelve terrorist groups because of their role in disrupting the Middle East peace process, neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden made the list.31

I'd much rather suffer and perish in the pursuit of my own life than wither away in the shadow of someone elses.

The healthy man does not torture others—generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.” —psychiatrist Carl Jung2

She couldn’t allow herself to be lured close to him again especially since she was a highwaywoman

And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.

I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

If you’re going to marry him, you’ll have to kiss him some time. I think you should do it after dessert, so if it’s terrible he’ll still taste like cake.

There’s always a reason to stay.

God, love is shit! You think you’ve cracked it, found someone, then it’s snatched away. Life moves on but you don’t. It looked like my own Prince Charming was turning into an ugly frog.

Despite the appearance of slovenliness or laziness created by the condition of the house, Langley was always busy and often complained of not having enough time to do the things he needed to do. One of those things, Langley told the police on several occasions, was clearing and organizing his home. He claimed to be saving things so that he and his brother could be self-sufficient.

For better or worse, Tess Langley is one of us. She shoved her way into our lives shortly after Rachel and wrapped us all around her damn finger. She’s weirdly become a best friend to each of us, giving us all what we need. In Mars’s case, it’s someone to push him. For Jake, it’s someone to laugh with and plan crazy, extravagant parties. For me, it’s someone to call me on my bullshit.

That’s it. Look, I want to put a Hellfire blast-and-frag from a drone into those guys before they get much closer or before they separate too far for one strike. You’ve got a Reaper floating somewhere in the area?” “Sir, I have to advise negative on the request. Sorry about your kid, but our directive is only to strike ID’d targets and then only with Langley clearance. I just can’t do it.

The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9

'You know that saying, give a man enough rope?' When Matt nodded, Howard continued. 'I can assure you the person who came up with it didn't know Aubrey. You give him enough rope and he'll tie you to a chair with it.'

When is posttraumatic stress pathological? The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV23 or DSM-IV-TR24)b lays out specific criteria. Criterion A: Trauma. Yes, the event that created Batman (1) involved death or physical danger and (2) horrified the survivor. Criterion B: Persistent re-experiencing. Yes, Bruce re-experiences his parents’ murders through recurrent, vivid recollections and

Some of them screamed. Some of them wept. Some of them grinned like LSD was a blast. A case officer said John Stanton hatched the idea - lets flood Cuba with this shit before we invade. Langley co-signed the brainstorm. Langley embellished it: Let's induce mass hallucinations and stage the second coming of Christ!!!! Langley found some suicidal actors. Langley dolled them up to look like J.C. Langley had them set to pre-invade Cuba concurrent with the dope saturation. Peter howled. The case officer said, 'It's not funny.' A drug-zorched peon whipped out his wang and jacked off.

Edison’s famous “invention” of the incandescent light bulb on the night of October 21, 1879, improved on many other incandescent light bulbs patented by other inventors between 1841 and 1878. Similarly, the Wright brothers’ manned powered airplane was preceded by the manned unpowered gliders of Otto Lilienthal and the unmanned powered airplane of Samuel Langley; Samuel Morse’s telegraph was preceded by those of Joseph Henry, William Cooke, and Charles Wheatstone; and Eli Whitney’s gin for cleaning short-staple (inland) cotton extended gins that had been cleaning long-staple (Sea Island) cotton for thousands of years.

CIA analysis began by late 1994 to run in a different direction. The insights Black and his case officers could obtain into bin Laden’s inner circle were limited, but they knew that bin Laden was working closely with the Sudanese intelligence services. They knew that Sudanese intelligence, in turn, was running paramilitary and terrorist operations in Egypt and elsewhere. Bin Laden had access to Sudanese military radios, weapons, and about two hundred Sudanese passports. These passports supplemented the false documents that bin Laden acquired for his aides from the travel papers of Arab volunteers who had been killed in the Afghan jihad. Working with liaison intelligence services across North Africa, Black and his Khartoum case officers tracked bin Laden to three training camps in northern Sudan. They learned that bin Laden funded the camps and used them to house violent Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian, and Palestinian jihadists. Increasingly the Khartoum station cabled evidence to Langley that bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army. He was a threat.

He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry? Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh--that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, "can't paint, can't write," why should I help him to relieve himself? There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube97 were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there 96 Cheated or frustrated himself. 97 The London subway. 64 smiling. "You're not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily," said Mrs. Ramsay. "Remember poor Mr. Langley; he had been round the world dozens of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr. Tansley?" she asked. Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instrument as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life. But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley--a fact that nobody there seemed to realise; but one of these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him. "Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?" said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, "I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks--indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will snap"--when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment--what happens if one is not nice to that young man there--and be nice.