Lit Senior Quotes

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, “MANIFEST.” The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be -- if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being. But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it. Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level. Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

Look, this isn't about the ring or when I ever made a hamburger, which, for your information, was my senior year of college." "Right, when you almost caught our kitchen on fire." "And you dated one of the firefighters for six months. You're welcome. Back to my problem.

When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.

Tameka stared intently at the poorly lit bathroom mirror as she continued to pick confetti out of her long, giant mass of curly hair. “Thank you fellow seniors for ruining what was a good hair day,” Meka said to no one in particular as she continued to finger comb the paper-enthusiasm out of her brunette locks.

On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with the schoolkids, playing soccer and passing out candy and school supplies. One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face. I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close for me. For my entire life, I’d harbored resentment at the world. I was mad at my mother and father, mad that I rode the bus to school while other kids caught rides with friends, mad that my clothes didn’t come from Abercrombie, mad that my grandfather died, mad that we lived in a small house. That resentment didn’t vanish in an instant, but as I stood and surveyed the mass of children of a war-torn nation, their school without running water, and the overjoyed boy, I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally. At that moment, I resolved to be the type of man who would smile when someone gave him an eraser. I haven’t quite made it there, but without that day in Iraq, I wouldn’t be trying. The

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.

Abbott’s one big idea in Health was for the Commonwealth to take control of all the nation’s hospitals. This required a shift in his thinking. In the Keating years he had declared that Australia had “a perfectly good system of government provided each tier minds its own business.” He didn’t think so any longer. “As a new backbencher, I had not anticipated how hard this was, given that voters don’t care who solves their problems, they just want them solved.” As Minister for Health he lit on a new guiding conservative principle: “Power divided is power controlled.” He had in mind an enormous reform that would reshape Canberra’s relations with the states. He was roundly mocked in cabinet. His senior bureaucrats put a lot of work into talking him down. Did he really want to be responsible for every asthma patient who had to wait too long in an emergency department? Eventually he was persuaded that Commonwealth public servants could not run hospitals any better than state public servants. This was the argument that got him, but he found it frustrating.

A good campaign usually deploys multiple tactics: paid media (TV ads, digital ads, radio ads, print ads), earned media (which is just jargon for public relations), opposition research (a euphemism for digging up dirt on someone), field (canvassing, door knocking, flyers, lit drops, posters, phone calls), lobbying (personal connections in one way or another), and today, perhaps more than anything else, social media. We went at it on every front. I convened a meeting of our senior team every morning at 8 a.m. to discuss what we could to do to drive Anthony from the race. Here’s the best of what we did: Earned media: I kicked things off by saying, on the front page of the New York Times, that if Anthony ran, I’d add an extra $20 million to our campaign budget to ensure that we destroyed his reputation so thoroughly, he’d never be able to run for anything ever again. In retrospect, the threat probably landed harder than I realized because Anthony was already starting to self-destruct. (It wasn’t like what he got caught doing on Twitter didn’t exist in other, pre-Twitter formats before then.) We started exactly where anyone would when it comes to Anthony Weiner: sex. In his time as a member of the House, Anthony had passed all of one bill. And that one illustrious piece of legislation was to give more visas to models. Yep, protecting the rights of hot women was Anthony’s sole achievement in office. That was a good point to make but not an exposé in and of itself. But then our research team noticed something: Anthony had also received campaign contributions from many of the models who received highly coveted H1B visas. Not only was this pay-to-play (give contributions, get government favors), it was illegal.

Who knew murders and intrigue and betrayal could be so boring? At least, that’s my view of Shakespeare in my senior Lit class.

They may have been the same rank, but he was still technically her senior — in both age and experience — and sometimes he liked to flex. Make himself look like he gave a damn. She leaned forward, hit the keyboard shortcut to minimise the windows, and got up. ‘Nothing,’ she said, pulling her jacket on. ‘That’s helpful.’ She ignored the comment, downed half her now-tepid coffee and bit lightly into her bagel, holding it between straight white teeth as she powered off her monitor and tucked her chair in.  ‘I don’t know why you bother,’ Roper said, flicking a hand at the now-black screen. ‘Not while all this is burning.’ He gestured around the room at the other desks and detectives working away. Dozens of screens were lit, the photocopier was buzzing, the lights were humming, and phones and devices were charging on every surface.  She shrugged. ‘If you leave a monitor on standby overnight it wastes enough energy to—’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, dismissing her with his hand. ‘And the polar ice caps are melting and penguins are getting sunburn. Come on, we’ve got a murder to solve.’ He walked forward, draining what was left in his coffee cup, and put it down on a random desk — much to the disgust of the guy sitting behind it. Roper swaggered towards the lifts, finally shrugging off the hangover, his caffeine quota for the next hour filled. Once his nicotine level had been topped off, he might actually be capable of some decent police work. Jamie fell in behind him, trying to get her mind off the other missing kids and back on Grace Melver. Whatever the hell was going on, Jamie had a feeling that Grace Melver knew something about it. Whether she realised or not.  Chapter 7 She walked with Roper without thinking about it.  Jamie had dropped him back at the crime scene after the shelter so he could pick his car up. The medical examiner was there and the scene of the crime officers, or SOCOs, were crawling all over in their plastic-covered boots, snapping photos and putting things in evidence bags.  They hadn’t stuck around.  It was best to leave the SOCOs do their jobs, and anyway Jamie and Roper had paperwork that needed to be done.  Her fingers typed on autopilot now. She’d had her prelim licked before she’d finished her first cup of coffee. Roper headed for his Volvo without asking and got into the driver’s seat.  Jamie pulled the door open and got in, closing the door only when he’d cranked the ignition so she could crack the window. The seats were covered

You know what I’m gonna do? A lot of obscene and illegal stuff, I’d wager. He said, I’m gonna fix this Lincoln up and drive it back to Leechfield. My senior year ride. No more Mama’s Torino. Like you will, I said. Like I won’t. My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy.

I got out my whistle. I blew it. I couldn’t hear anything because of the high-pitched sound waves or whatever, but the whistle’s inscription lit up in rainbow colors—LEO+PERCY 4EVER ♥. As I may have mentioned, Leo is a doofus.