Orphan X Quotes

A guy can love a million women. But a man, a man loves one woman a million ways.

Respect for women is essential,” Jack tells him. “Women’s rights and economic development within a country are highly correlated. Treating women properly is not just a moral position—which it is—or an American value—which it is. It’s a strategic imperative, and you will always, always lead by example in this regard.

Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

How you do anything is how you do everything

There is no emotion more useless than self-pity. Evan

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Every time I consider myself an adult, I think back five years to when I also thought of myself as an adult. And I’m aghast at how staggeringly blind I was. Maybe what I hold to be true right now will seem just as ignorant when I reflect back on it years from now.

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's worth doing. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Always respect life. Then you'll value yours. The hard part isn't turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.

Next time, he thinks. The two best words in the English language.

Look at me closely. Ask yourself: Do I look scared?

Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.

NEXT TIME.” The two best words in the English language. Freedom and possibility. Progress, not perfection. Just do something a little bit better than the last go-round and your place in the world would get a little bit clearer.

Women’s rights and economic development within a country are highly correlated.

People talk about starting over,’ he said. ‘But you can’t start over. All you can do is change direction.

If you have to be hit over the head to learn something about yourself, you’ll be someone who thinks that people only learn if you hit them over the head.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Evan sits on the floor, hard; the collective wisdom of four cultures distilled into a single ass kicking.

Remember what Confucius say: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

Think this through,” Evan said. “Do I seem like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing?

Maybe that’s all growing up is. Knowing in real time that you don’t know anything.

I’ll tell you this: Parenting ain’t for sissies.

Envision someone else, someone better than you. Stronger. Smarter. Tougher. Then do what that guy would do.

If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.

When you get stuck, remember that you can deal with physical issues intellectually and intellectual issues emotionally. You can work out emotional issues psychologically and psychological issues spiritually. Those are the spokes of the wheel—one breaks, you can use another to fix it.

To destroy something you cannot be is to embrace your darkest heart, to yield to an ungodly desire. It is to be hijacked by what you aren’t rather than nourished by what you are. Because what you are is nothing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been out in the cold, nose up to the glass, looking in. I may not get to come inside, Jack. But I’m sure as hell not gonna let the wolves in at everyone else. No. That’s one thing I’m good for.

Anticipation of pain leads to fear, and fear amplifies pain,” he says. “Expectation of relief from pain increases the opioids in the brain, makes the hurting stop. How your mind reacts to pain determines how much pain you actually feel.

She was every Cora she'd ever been: Cora X, Cora Kaufmann, Cora Carlisle. She was an orphan on a roof, a lucky girl on a train, a dearly loved daughter by chance. She was a blushing bride of seventeen, a sad and stoic wife, a loving mother, an embittered chaperone, and a daughter pushed away. She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, and aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quiet and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.

battle that rages inside every person.’ ‘The two wolves.’ ‘That’s right. One wolf is anger and fear and paranoia and cruelty. The other is kindness, humility, compassion, serenity. And the boy asks his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” You remember the answer?’ ‘ “The one you feed.” ’ ‘That’s right.

The Unofficial Eleventh Commandment: Don’t fall in love with Plan A.

And I may not have the standing to tell you this, but I want you to know I’m proud of you. I see you, and I’m proud of you.

A diamond’s just a lump of coal that knows how to deal with pressure.

His training had consisted of learning a little bit about everything from people who knew everything about something.

Evan needed to get food, and then he had people to kill.

You can’t help people more than they want to help themselves.

I usually find,” Evan said, “that people will show you how they want to be treated if you pay attention.

Most husbands seek to kill their wives’ loves so we’ll love only them. They are insecure little boys.

The Fourth (Commandment) wasn't working, so he dug the the Fifth: If you don't know what to do, do nothing. There was no situation that could not be made worse.

Dogs are always who they are. Why can’t people just be dogs?” Evan didn’t speak for a moment. “Because we’re not good enough.

be one thing at a time, one thing and one thing only.

He could handle chaos in the world as long as there was order at home.

If you have to ask for respect, you’re not gonna get it.

Another Jackism: When they come to kill you, you don’t get to tell them you aren’t ready.

Act like the person you want to be.’” It was one of Jack’s favorite quotations; just thinking of him put a rasp in Evan’s voice. “If we want to get through whatever’s coming, we’re gonna have to face it head-on.

That’s right. One wolf is anger and fear and paranoia and cruelty. The other is kindness, humility, compassion, serenity. And the boy asks his grandfather, ‘Which wolf wins?’ You remember the answer?” “‘The one you feed.

People are messy. Relationships aren’t linear. They knock you on your ass. Make you detour, reverse, change focus. You can’t be perfect unless you’re alone, and then guess what? You’re alone. So you’re still not perfect.

You are safe. You are loved.’” Her eyes glimmered. “Can you imagine?” Walking behind Jack in the woods, placing his feet in Jack’s footprints. “Yes,” Evan said. “Maybe that’s all anyone needs,” Joey said. “One person who feels that way about you. To keep you human.

Comedy is tragedy plus x, with x being an amount of time defined by the person experiencing the tragedy. Some people need less time than others. I joked about Dad’s death as it was happening. But that gave some friends the impression they could join in . No . My dad, my jokes. A Facebook friend posted one day after Dad died: “Welcome to the Dead Dad Club.” I hated him instantly. He was an Early Orphan. I scrolled through his profile pictures, I saw smiles . Life had gone on for him. I didn’t want to be in his stupid club, I didn’t want to read his wry asides.

It has nothing to do with rough or gentle. Privileged or broke, everyone has their own path to the light. Sometimes those of us who came up hard are forced to see what actually matters. If we survive, that is. The world doesn’t allow us not to see. We are forced into understanding, into grace. It’s either that or prison, or drugs, or the cold, hard earth.

That’s just the circus roaring its insanity at the periphery.” “It’s not insanity. It’s real.” “What is? Your fear? Resentment? Grief? Insecurity?” Finally the left side of Jack’s mouth curls up a millimeter or two. “Your rage.” “Yes. Sure. All of that.” “Of course they’re real. However. When they’re roaring? They are insane. They are discordant. They are running you instead of your running them.” “So what am I supposed to do?” “Invite them in, one at a time. Have each one pull up a stool. Listen to what it has to say. Whether it’s shrilling or plucking or thundering away. Learn its timbre, its pitch, its intensity. Then assign it its place in the pit below you. Each one. Grief, fear, rage. Set the orchestra in order a section at a time.

vanguard

He’d done his best to lock himself off from the past, and yet here it was again, rearing its head, threatening to buck him like a horse.

Fear needs a future,” Evan said. “Let’s focus on the present.

that

When you’re at a wall, start climbing.

ALPR is?” she asked. “Automated license-plate recognition,” Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. “Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour.

Blood in, blood out. You kill to get in. They kill you before they will ever let you leave.

He hangs out near campuses at lunch, after classes, his skateboard rat-a-tat-tatting across sidewalk cracks just barely past school-ground limits. The girls cluster and giggle, and he chooses one to peel off the herd. He tells her to snap pictures. He tells her to get a secret Facebook account, one her parents don’t know about, and upload them there. He tells her that everyone does this in high school, and he’s mostly right, but not everyone is hooked into a scheme like this. He targets Title I schools, broke girls, easily impressed, looking for a dream, a romance, a way out. Girls whose parents lack the resources to do much if they disappear. The secret Facebook page links go to Hector Contrell. The genius of it is, the girls create the sales catalog themselves.

From Contrell the links go to all sorts of men with unorthodox tastes. Austrian industrialists. Sheikhs. Three brothers in Detroit with a padlocked metal shed. Online they can peruse the merchandise discreetly and, if need be, ask for more product information—different photographic angles, specific poses. They make their selections. Given immigration confusion, gang influence, and splintered family trees, disappearances aren’t rare when you’re dealing with broke ethnic girls. They’re a renewable resource. Hector Contrell comes in the black of night, and another girl vanishes off the streets and wakes up in a stupor in Islamabad or Birmingham or São Paulo. Some of the girls are kept. Some are designated for onetime use.

One day after school, Addison’s blue eyes peer out from beneath his scraggly bangs and pick her and only her. That night she touches up her eyeliner, sheds the flat-front Dickies with the worn knees, checks the lighting. This choice, this moment, is going to be a portal to a Whole New Her. But after she uploads the selfie, nothing magical happens. Staring at the image she has released into the world, she feels an unease begin to gnaw at her. She decides to stop after the one photo. But Addison needs more; they’ve been requested from a buyer in Serbia. In a ganja haze, he catches her in the alley outside her family’s one-bedroom apartment. When his low-rent hipster charms fail him, he tells her what she’d better do. Big-shotting in the Crenshaw night, he lets fly that he works for someone who will hurt her and her family if she turns off the tap.

learning a little bit about everything from people who knew everything about something

You can either be the center of attention or pay attention. You can’t do both.

The Polugar, please,” Evan said. “Up. Bruise it.

Olives?” “No, thank you,” Evan said. “Not for the Polugar.” “I understand.” The single-malt rye vodka smelled like dough. A throwback to the pre-ethanol distillation process that produced the Russian breadwine enjoyed by literal and literary nobility from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, Polugar meant “half-burned.” The term signified the outstanding portion of liquid remaining after the excess had been burned away. Far off the beaten path in the woods of Poland, the vodka was not aged in oak barrels but triple-distilled in copper and filtrated with egg whites and birch coal.

That is the awful, beautiful, sacrificial power of love. We sharpen ourselves against those we love in order to cut ourselves open and see what’s inside. Sometimes I wonder if wisdom is nothing more than shortening the time before you realize how ignorant you are about something.

Evan had learned that nothing in the world was more dangerous than a weak man who felt humiliated.

Have you ever really been seen? I don’t mean the way we act every day. I mean like someone really gets you. The real part of you?” Evan gripped the wheel, didn’t answer.

You fit in, sure, but that’s different from belonging

We don’t rise to the level of our aspirations, Jack said. We fall to the level of our training.

What we resist pursues us. What we accept transforms us. Who said that? Aren’t you listening, son? That almost-smile, the one that crinkled

Evan said, “I always figured men who have a type lack imagination.

He coughed, felt it through his entire skeleton. Pain was good. Pain told him he was still alive. No pain was not good. No pain meant he was dead.

Evan sipped the matcha tea once more. It wasn’t half bad. He wondered at the kind of life that called for a steamed-milk waterfowl decorating one’s hot beverage.

Evan nodded, but Bedrosov remained motionless, the picture of control. His eyes were unblinking, reptilian. Evan had read once that there were more psychopaths in business than in any other field. The man before him seemed a perfect case study.

She said, “It’s important you know that you were wanted.” He cut the connection, threw the phone onto the bed, and stared at it, breathing hard, his shoulders heaving. It hadn’t occurred to him to want to be wanted.

Evan nodded, chewed his lip. “Let me be clear. I’m a nice guy by choice.

As the Second Commandment decreed, How you do anything is how you do everything.

He could see her extraordinariness only when he considered the fullness of who she was, not just the shape of who he wanted her to be.

Aragón observed them. “All our sins and temptations at our fingertips all day. We carry them in our pocket. Our technology outweighs our character.

Evan thought about when he’d worked on Joey’s shoulder, how it had been tender to the point of intolerability. It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.

The measure of a man is how tough he can be to the world and how sensitive he can be to women.” Aragón took another sip. “Women are fucking Swiss Army knives. Throw anything at them and they figure out which part of them to use to fix it, care for it, make it better. They can hear if a baby’s cough is just a cough, can smell if something’s burning in the next room. They can see when our arrogance is serving us. And point out when it’s not.

And yet it was related, too, in a way that was even deeper, that carried with it some great mythic importance for her that he couldn’t fully comprehend.

How?” “Everyone is appraised when they share a meal. Do you belong here? Do you pay attention? Will you abide by the rules of our family? Will you show respect?” Aragón nodded toward La Tía, vigorously scrubbing a pan under steaming water. “Two times you offered to help. A man who doesn’t offer to help cannot be trusted. Two times she rebuffed you. The third time you didn’t ask.

To lose a child, it’s not just her dying. It is the death of the future. It is the death of the entire world.

When she’d placed her hand on his cheek, looked into him, and released him to do what it was that he did, she’d seen him for the first time, not the image of who she hoped him to be. Simple as it sounded, perhaps that was what love really was.

There is a generational Seabrookian root-beer-float debate. A&W. Or Mug." "I don't drink root-beer-floats," Evan said. "Oh, shut up.

For Marshall Herskovitz From whom I learned that the top of the alpha dominance hierarchy is still beneath the lowest level of what constitutes wisdom

And she was worried that … that she could be expecting. And she stayed with me, and she took those damn tests every day, like playing a lottery you don’t want to win. But sure enough she won. And even though this was a child born of violence, it was still a child. People don’t always understand that these days. It’s not some political statement, but it’s different when it happens to you, I suppose. And she decided she wanted to bring this child to term.

And to survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. God, what do I know? Maybe it was all projection. My own broken heart mapped onto a newborn.

There’s nothing more dangerous than thinking you’re a victim.” Andre snorted. “Ain’t that some shit. How ’bout the people who want to kill my ass? They more dangerous’n me?” “They think they’re victims, too,” Evan said. “That’s where it gets you.” “Listen to your judgmental ass.” “Without judgment,” Evan said, “we’ve got nowhere to go.

lives and now they’re full, brimming with life, with triumph. And you’re outside, right? You don’t know this game. You don’t give a shit. But you envy them being so goddamned alive, for knowing what they care about and what they want and for trying to get at it. For being in it, man. And you’re just sitting there watching.” Andre’s voice grew hoarse. “When you’re like us, that’s how everything feels sometimes.” Evan caught the words before they came out. I’m not like you. Andre said, “You’re never jealous of folks like that? People who can just be … you know, happy.” “You think happiness is the point?” “Of what?” “Of life.” “Ain’t it?” Evan shrugged. “I don’t know if you can build anything on it.” “What do you build on, then?” “Responsibility,” Evan said. “Duty.

Maybe happiness is overrated,” Evan said. “Freedom, too. Maybe the only way to get anywhere worth being is to pick up the heaviest thing you can carry. And carry it.

Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving. What if that was the point? To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered? Without that, what was there to preserve?

Don’t surround yourself with like-minded people. You’ll get limited or radicalized.” “By

So you disappeared. Never called.” “It’s not like we were engaged.” “True,” Evan said. “But you took your own insecurity and put it on her. That weakens her. And it weakens you. You treat a young woman like that with respect. If nothing else it’ll teach you about yourself, teach you who you want to be whenever you’re ready to be that person. Understand?

Evan heard the passenger door close before he noticed that Andre had climbed out. He watched him walk into the building, pulling his shoulders back, lifting his head with an assumed air of dignity.

Evan said, “It looks nice.” She turned back, beaming, her face colored with delight. “Thank you.” In the aftermath of her departure, he breathed her lingering perfume and thought about how little it had taken to impart that much joy. She’d felt noticed. At the end of the day, maybe that was all anyone wanted.

His mother’s gaze held the totality of him. It was the only place he’d ever seen it reflected. She was the mirror by which he might be able to know himself.

Dog tilted his head up to slurp the underside of Evan’s chin. Joey scowled. “I meant real life without…” “Responsibility?” “I didn’t say that!” She considered. “But yeah.” “Responsibility’s where you find meaning