Loan Shark Quotes

Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

Loan sharks don’t negotiate, Finn. They break kneecaps and chop off fingers.

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.

The only dream I ever had was the dream of New York itself, and for me, from the minute I touched down in this city, that was enough. It became the best teacher I ever had. If your mother is anything like mine, after all, there are a lot of important things she probably didn't teach you: how to use a vibrator; how to go to a loan shark and pull a loan at 17 percent that's due in thirty days; how to hire your first divorce attorney; what to look for in a doula (a birth coach) should you find yourself alone and pregnant. My mother never taught me how to date three people at the same time or how to interview a nanny or what to wear in an ashram in India or how to meditate. She also failed to mention crotchless underwear, how to make my first down payment on an apartment, the benefits of renting verses owning, and the difference between a slant-6 engine and a V-8 (in case I wanted to get a muscle car), not to mention how to employ a team of people to help me with my life, from trainers to hair colorists to nutritionists to shrinks. (Luckily, New York became one of many other moms I am to have in my lifetime.) So many mothers say they want their daughters to be independent, but what they really hope is that they'll find a well-compensated banker or lawyer and settle down between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight in Greenwich, Darien, or That Town, USA, to raise babies, do the grocery shopping, and work out in relative comfort for the rest of their lives. I know this because I employ their daughters. They raise us to think they want us to have careers, and they send us to college, but even they don't really believe women can be autonomous and take care of themselves.

Why do we still cling to the intellectually retarded notion that liberty can be obtained, maintained, or lost at the end of a gun barrel? When you're working 3 minimum wage jobs to make the minimum payment on a pair of socks you bought 12 years ago because your credit card company slapped you with an interest rate that would make a loan shark holler WTF! ... well, no one needs to hold a gun to your head. Your ass has already been sold down the river.

poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto conmen. Gangsters, gun runners, bank robbers – adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury – all possess the librarian’s basic skill set. Scalpers and loan sharks certainly have a role to play. But even they lack that something, the je ne sais quoi, the elusive it. What would a pimp call it? Yes: the love.

You were in business making meth? Do you have any idea what that drug does to people?" We weren't givin' it away," Concise snaps. "If someone was fool enough to mess himself up, that was his problem." I shake my head, disgusted. "If you build it, they will come." If you build it," Concise says, "you cover your rent. If you build it, you pay off the loan sharks. If you build it, you put shoes on your kid's feet and food in his belly and maybe even show up every now and then with a toy that every other goddamn kid in the school already has." He looks up at me. "If you build it, maybe your son don't have to, when he grow up." It is amazing -- the secrets you can keep, even when you are living in close quarters. "You didn't tell me." Concise gets up and braces his hands against the upper bunk. "His mama OD'd. He lives with her sister, who can't always be bothered to take care of him. I try to send money so that I know he's eatin' breakfast and gettin' school lunch tickets. I got a little bank account for him, too. Jus' in case he don't want to be part of a street gang, you know? Jus' in case he want to be an astronaut or a football player or somethin'." He digs out a small notebook from his bunk. "I'm writin' him. A diary, like. So he know who his daddy is, by the time he learn to read." It is always easier to judge someone than to figure out what might have pushed him to the point where he might do something illegal or morally reprehensible, because he honestly believes he'll be better off. The police will dismiss Wilton Reynolds as a drug dealer and celebrate one more criminal permanently removed from society. A middle-class father who meets Concise on the street, with his tough talk and his shaved head, will steer clear of him, never guessing that he, to, has a little boy waiting for him at home. The people who read about me in the paper, stealing my daughter during a custody visit, will assume I am the worst sort of nightmare.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today’s major problem, not inflation.

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

LOAN SHARK FOUND DEAD. Stabbed, it turned out, over a card

Loan sharking may mean investment and immediate solutions but desperate loan sharks, who are short of cash, abuse your rights and attack other people's home. ~ Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul

I s’pose if some man’s been inside you often enough, it’ll take a while to get rid of him. Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

Debt has become the means of subjecting everyone – from sovereign nations to homeowners and victims of payday loan sharks – to a mixture of ersatz morality and threats. Pay your debts or else you’re a bad person or bad country, and so bad things will happen to you.35

I wake up to pain. What did Callum do now? Whip my face with his monster cock?

There are 350 varieties of shark, not counting loan and pool.

Slava, working in concert with the philosophy of the nation that had taken them in—good works as the by-product of self-interest—was able to give the descendants at the table, the children and grandchildren, the gift of knowing, at last, the unknown corners of their forebears, all because the forebears stood to make money. How cheaply they fell—the heart’s greatest terrors for a bushel of euros. Slava wasn’t a judge: He was a middleman, a loan shark, an alchemist—he turned lies into facts, words into money, silence into knowledge at last.

No one ever took charge in my life except me. I was left to fend for myself and for my mother now as well. Her unexpected illness left me with not only my loans but also her clinic bills. My father died in a boating accident. The memory of blood stained water and a frenzied shark had kept me out of the ocean for years.

Mario “The Screwdriver” Tetragna—respected patriarch of his immediate blood family, much-feared don of the broader Tetragna Family that controlled drug traffic, gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, pornography, and other organized criminal activity in San Francisco—was a five-foot-seven-inch, three-hundred-pound tub with a face as plump and greasy and smooth as an overstuffed sausage casing. It was hard to believe that this rotund specimen could have built an infamous criminal operation. True, Tetragna had been young once, but even then he would have been short, and he had the look of a man who’d been fat all his life. His pudgy, stubby-fingered hands reminded Vince of a baby’s hands. But they were the hands that ruled the Family’s empire. When Vince had looked into Mario Tetragna’s eyes, he instantly realized that the don’s stature and his all too evident decadence were of no importance. The eyes were those of a reptile: flat, cold, hard, watchful. If you weren’t careful, if you displeased him, he would hypnotize you with those eyes and take you the way a snake would take a mesmerized mouse; he would choke you down whole and digest you.

Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax-returns better than H & R Block. He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies, which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks. When he’d finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand . . . and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man. Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness didn’t end after he’d been in cold storage for awhile, as it might have done. He began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger.

Looks like a hit on a local loan shark,” I say. “A guy by the name of Octavio

loan sharking as the icing on the cake. He had

We made more money than God’s loan shark with those treatments. Of

Of course, I know many fine rich people,” the Governor said, perhaps thinking of his campaign contributors. “But most of them are like a rich old feller I know down in Plaquemines Parish, who died one night and never done nobody no good in his life, and yet, when the Devil come to get him, he took an appeal to St. Peter. “’I done some good things on earth,’ he said. ‘Once, on a cold day in about 1913, I gave a blind man a nickel.’ St. Peter looked all through the records, and at last, on page four hundred and seventy-one, he found the entry. ‘That ain’t enough to make up for a misspent life,’ he said. ‘But, wait,’ the rich man says. ‘Now I remember, in 1922 I give five cents to a poor widow woman that had no carfare.’ St. Peter’s clerk checked the book again, and on page thirteen hundred and seventy-one, after pages and pages of this old stump-wormer loan-sharked the poor, he found the record of that nickel. “’That ain’t neither enough,’ St. Peter said. But the mean old thing yelled, ‘Don’t, sentence me yet. In about 1931 I give a nickel to the Red Cross.’ The clerk found that entry, too. So he said to St. Peter, ‘Your Honor, what are we going to do with him?’” The crowd hung on Uncle Earl’s lips the way the bugs hovered in the light. “You know what St. Peter said?” The Governor, the only one in the courthouse square who knew the answer, asked. There was, naturally, no reply. “He said: ‘Give that man back his fifteen cents and tell him to go to Hell.

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners?) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their communities. Yet the very name, "usurer," evokes images of loan sharks, blood money, pounds of flesh, the selling of souls, and behind them all, the Devil, often represented as himself a kind of usurer, an evil accountant with his books and ledgers.

for most, booze is a loan shark, someone they trusted for a while, came to count on, before it turned ugly.

The next signal I explain to Kelly is one I call loan-sharking: “He wanted to be allowed to help you because that would place you in his debt, and the fact that you owe a person something makes it hard to ask him to leave you alone.

Our elders had taught us well. First of all, you had to respect all living creatures — a category which did not include policemen, people connected with the government, bankers, loan sharks and all those who had the power of money in their hands and exploited ordinary people. Secondly, you had to believe in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, and love and respect the other ways of believing in God which were different from our own. But the Church and religion must never be seen as a structure. My grandfather used to say that God didn’t create priests, but only free men; there were some good priests, and in such cases it was not sinful to go to the places where they carried out their activities, but it definitely was a sin to think that in the eyes of God priests had more power than other men. Lastly, we must not do to others what we wouldn’t want to be done to us; and if one day we were obliged to do it nonetheless, there must be a good reason.

- Tell me the new one isn’t a fuck like that one and the other one, - he said, tossing me the boots he had in his hand. I felt myself smile a little wistfully. - He’s one of the good ones. Grig’s head turned to the side. - You? With a good guy? - he asked, genuinely amused then. - I refuse to believe that. - Okay. So he’s a loan shark enforcer.

What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious. “The night. It’s got its own set of rules.” “Day’s got rules too.” “Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.” They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time. “I don’t understand,” Danny said softly. “I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.” “But that’s life,” Danny said. “That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.

During his two-year term, Hunt introduced the inspections of tenement houses, appointed school nurses, provided food inspection and dental services for school children, closed illegal gambling halls, introduced a plan to improve city sewers, introduced the regulation of loan sharks who preyed on the poor, and settled several strikes.

It’s important to clarify that forced teaming, too many details, charm, niceness, typecasting and loan sharking are all in daily use by people who have no sinister intent. You might have already recognized several of these strategies as those commonly used by men who want little more than an opportunity to engage a woman in conversation.

Rumors in Thailand don’t have fathers or mothers. They’re orphans of loan sharks, con men, streetwalkers, and fortune tellers. No one claims them until they become legitimate.

The Inferno is not a presumptuous outline of what lies in store for adulterers, loan sharks, con artists, assassins, and traitors. It is a profound analysis of what sin actually does to the human soul. We need not wait for entrance into hell for the punishment to begin. It begins with the sin; in fact, it is the sin, setting its roots down into the soul, deforming it, and draining it of health. Dante never merely shows us that a thing is evil. He shows us in scenes of great dramatic power what the evil is and what it does, both to the doer and to the human community.

It’s okay. I know you’re a good girl, but your heart is too soft. You think the loan sharks who hounded him day and night cared that he had a wife and a young daughter?

deciding how best to play with Bambi before taking her down. Fallyn met his gaze, refusing to feel small in his presence, though in her bare feet, she was exactly that. “Your whole family spat on my mother’s casket, but you’re bringing me flowers?” “Papa D left the family business to me, and I’m tired of burying people. Aren’t you?” “Well, yeah. I’ve been trying to make peace for years, but you never seemed up for it. Now you’re bringing me flowers?” Tired of holding onto the declaration of a truce, Vince laid the bouquet on the employee desk. “I guess I am. You’re well within your rights to open a store here. Killian and I have an understanding. I trust you’re keeping everything above board?” Fallyn raised her chin defiantly, knowing her sass made her look every bit the twelve years younger than him she was. “Our family never dealt.” His lower lip tightened. “I’m well aware. I was talking about the loan sharking. None of that going on through here?” Fallyn took a steadying breath. “Killian’s moving the family business away from sharking so he can dole out more reasonable loans, and I was never involved in any of that when we did. You know that. It’s just a bakery, nothing more.” “We stopped dealing, too. I was just checking.” “You can check with Killian. You know he’s in charge.” “Yes, but I can tell if you’re lying to me or not. With them, it’s anybody’s guess. I want things to stay peaceful. With one look, you’re an open book.” He motioned around the kitchen. “More things like this happening is what I want.” He lowered his gaze to hers, piercing her with his icy stare that was both scrutinizing and superior. “Joey told me he was here last week. Did he cause any trouble?” “No, but he probably should stay away for a bit. He showed up fishing for trouble, and Danny and Carrigan almost gave him exactly that.

Borrowing today to pay tomorrow is harrowing; loan sharks will arrow your marrow till sorrow wash over you.

My lord has read in reputable books that Icelanders emit such a foul stench that men have to position themselves upwind when speaking to them." Jón Hreggviðsson said nothing. The adjunct said: "My lord has read in reputable books that the abode of the damned and of devils is in Iceland, within the mountain named Hekkenfeld. Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson said that he couldn't deny it. Next: "My lord has read in reputable books, primo, that in Iceland there are more specters, monsters, and devils that there are men; secundo, that Icelanders bury shark meat in the dungheaps by their cowsheds and afterward eat it; tertio, that starving Icelanders remove their shoes and cut pieces of them into their mouths like pancakes; quarto, that Icelanders live in mounds of earth; quinto, that Icelanders don't know how to work; sexto, that Icelanders loan foreigners their daughters for purposes of procreation; septimo, that an Icelandic girl is considered to be an unspoiled virgin until she has had her seventh illegitimate child. Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson gaped slightly. "My lord has read in reputable books that Icelanders are primo, thievish; secundo, liars; tertio, arrogant; quarto, lice-ridden; quinto, drunkards; sexto, debauchers; septimo, cowards, unfit for war—" the adjunct said all of this without moving and the colonel continued to grind his teeth and stare at Jón Hreggviðsson. "Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson swallowed to try to wet his throat. The adjunct raised his voice and repeated: "Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson straightened up and said: "My forefather Gunnar of Hlíðarendi was twelve ells high." The colonel said something to the adjunct and the adjunct said loudly: "My lord says that whoever commits perjury beneath the standard shall suffer the wheel and the rack." "Twelve ells," repeated Jón Hreggviðsson. "I won't take it back. And he lived to be three hundred years old. And he wore a gold band around his forehead. His halberd sang the sweetest song that has ever been heard in the North. And the girls are young and slender and come during the night to free men, and are called fair maidens and are said to have the bodies of elves—

You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. I'm not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men's club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid's grades. Die at my desk, and they'll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt's hit the coffin.

It wasn't Glen's jealousy that surprised him. "You owe Roy money?" "Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted." "Roy's a loan shark, too?" "You ever see JAWS?" Snakebite asked. Glen said he had. "How 'bout THE GODFATHER?" "Yeah." "Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you'd have old Roy." from the Tom Franklin short story "Grit" (page 31) from POACHERS:STORIES

BROADCAST HISTORY: 1935–36, WMCA, New York (premiere date March 31, 1935). Sept. 20–Dec. 20, 1936, NBC. 60m, Sundays at 8. Chase and Sanborn. HOST: A. L. Alexander. Goodwill Court offered legal help to the poor, long before such terms as “legal aid” became common. The subjects were simply required to come before an NBC microphone and tell their stories to the nation. Their identities were protected, and they were ever under the eye of mediator A. L. Alexander, lest profanity or the name of an actual person slip out over the the air. The people told of marital trouble, of garnished wages and loan sharks, of all the little tragedies common to the average listener. It made compelling radio for its day.

As I enter the bar, he makes a point of glaring at his watch, which is the size of a snow globe and covered in multiple dials, with at least four knobs on the side. It could probably launch a nuclear strike on Pyongyang, but can it tell time? Grant stands up, flexing his shoulders as if to square up for a fight. He wears a black polo that strains to contain what's inside it, and excessively ironed black jeans. He is hulking and totally hairless, like a Buddha who has traded contemplation for capitalism and never looked back... The eyes, little beads of black, may well have been on loan from a shark.

Like any other idea, that of social business is subject to being misused and perverted. A few powerful people will look for ways to distort the concept and twist it for their own benefit—just as some misguided people have applied the term “microcredit” to describe companies that are really just loan sharks in disguise. Well-intentioned people will need to be on guard against those who would abuse the good name of social business.

tossed in a prison to wait on deportation. Now this. Now we’re supposed to somehow push it all aside and hustle back to law school for our last semester, which will be followed by two months in hell studying for the bar exam, so we can do something to make a little money and start repayment, which, actually, is far more impossible than it seems, and it seems awfully damned impossible at the moment. Yes, Zola dear, I’m tired. Aren’t you?” “I’m beyond exhausted,” she said. “That makes three of us,” Todd added. They slowed and passed through the small town of Boyce. When it was behind them, Mark asked, “Are you guys really going to class on Monday? I’m not.” “That’s either the second or the third time you’ve said that,” Zola said. “If you don’t go to class, then what are your plans?” “I have no plans. My status will be day to day.” “Okay, but what are you going to do when the law school starts calling?” Todd asked. “I won’t take their calls.” “Okay, so they’ll put you on inactive status and notify your loan sharks and they’ll be out for blood.” “What if they can’t find me? What if I change phone numbers and move to another apartment? It would be easy to get lost in a city of two million people.” “I’m listening,” Todd said. “So, you start hiding. What about work and income and those little challenges?” “I’ve been thinking about that,” Mark said and took a long swig. “Maybe I’ll get a job tending bar, for cash, of course. Maybe wait tables. Or maybe I’ll become a DUI specialist like that sleazeball we met last Friday at the city jail. What was his name?” “Darrell Cromley,” Zola said. “I’ll bet Darrell nets a hundred grand a year hustling DUIs. All cash.” “But you don’t have a license,” Zola said. “Did we ask Darrell to show us his license? Of course not. He said he was a lawyer.

Old gangsters had indeed moved into more legitimate enterprises—why limit yourself to prostitution and drugs and loan sharking when there were so many other ways to turn a buck?—but even with the best of intentions, it never worked out. Guys like the Aches couldn’t help themselves really. They’d start out legit, but once things got the slightest bit tough, once they lost out on a contract or a sale or something, they reverted back to their old ways. Couldn’t help it. Corruption too was a terrible addiction, but where were the support groups?