Plum Island Quotes

A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.

Everyone looked pensive, which is good cover-up for clueless.

I don't like mysteries, which is why I want to solve them. It bothers me that there are things I don't know.

As with real estate, what matters with bullet holes is location, location, location.

The air was so thick with testosterone that the wallpaper was getting soggy.

Princeton isn't actually part of New Jersey. It's a small island of wealth and intellectual eccentricity floating in the Sea of Central Megalopolis. It's an honest-to-god town awash in the land of the strip mall. Hair is smaller, heels are shorter, asses are tighter in Princeton.

Trying to improve on anthrax is like trying to improve on gunpowder. Anthrax is easy to propagate, easy to handle, it diffuses nicely into the air, kills slowly enough for the infected population to spread it around, and cripples as many victims as it kills, causing a collapse of the enemy’s health care system.

Anyway, I’m getting really intolerant of liars, fools, blowhards, and power freaks.

Really, is my closet transparent or something? And here I was, fretting day and night over how to come out, when every single person already saw through me?

Love is always the first thing that’s sacrificed when faced with reality and ideas split. Since that’s so, it’s better to live without it to begin with.

The way to a woman’s heart is through her funny bone. Women like men who make them laugh. I think.

Bucky's garage was a two-bay cinder block structure that sat like an island in a sea of cars. New cars, old cars, smashed cars, rusted cars, cars that had signed on for the vital organ program,

Sometimes people rationalize their behavior. How about the Americans who gave atomic bomb secrets to the Russians? They were people who said they did it out of conviction—so one side wouldn’t have all the power.

I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street, and not force me to exist in an "elsewhere". I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Grey Street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be a poet, I should spend my imaginative life among the nightingales instead of among the wax-eyes and the fantails. I wanted my life to be the "other world".

Sunday Morning V She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. VII Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VIII She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings

Chappell had brought a Mrs. Frazer to the island. She used an unorthodox divining method, much like water-witching, to detect metals under the surface. She found indications that copper, gold, and silver lay everywhere underground. Dad’s goodwill evaporated when she insisted that she needed to work at the Money Pit. It is clear, from a description of Mrs. Frazer in Dad’s letter to Fred Sparham, dated May 20, that Dad did not believe in the woman’s methods: Chappell brought a woman over who had a secret sort of metal finder. She has been back twice since. Mildred calls her Witch Hazel, and it’s more fun that a barrel of Monkeys. She runs around dangling a piece of plastic hose (clear) with a piece of metal in it that looks like a steel and brass plum bob. She has the whole lot hanging from a chain. She also has a gadget she takes out of a bag that looks like a pair of horns. Then she puts these horns against her forehead and goes around like a Moose. You just can’t believe it at all.

I'd written my name on the blackboard, and under my name I wrote the name of the course for the would-be Sherlock Holmeses who needed more than the instructor's name and room number to be certain they were in the right place.

Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy, until you can find a rock.

It’s getting harder to tell the difference between art and vandalism.

which

To Parker’s right, near Koenig, was Captain Henry Wydrzynski, Deputy Chief of Detectives with the Port Authority police. I’d met this guy a few times when I was an NYPD detective, and he seemed like an okay guy, except for his name, which looked like the third line of an eye chart. I mean, somebody should buy this guy a vowel.

The Irish are beautiful bullshitters. I mean, you know they’re lying, they know you know they’re lying, but they do it with so much charm, conviction, and energy that everyone feels kind of good about it.

Through a trick lighting technique the skyline was made and faded with the care of a pointillist— maybe aiding us to think nothing was missing. We traded verbs about what was happening in the metropolis, realizing, in the scorched plum of dusk, actual human infinity was occurring on an island before us....

Don’t buy anything. My philosophy is, if it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it.

There are seven major theories. You want to hear about the underwater methane gas bubble theory?” I had this disturbing image of whales in an underwater locker room lighting farts. I said, “Maybe later.

me, “Dickie Johnson and I were born together, grew up together, had lots of women together, and got old together, but he died before me.

If I were a scientist looking at this stuff, I might wonder about God—not about His existence, but His intent.

that the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.

couldn’t see anything sinister about the place, no paintings of burning churches on the walls, no black candles, no needlepoint pentagrams or black cats, and the kitchen had no bubbling witch’s cauldron.

the guy from the Midwest goes up to a New Yorker on the street and says, “Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building, or should I just go fuck myself?

There was a big banner hung at the entrance to the stacks which read: “Find Buried Treasure—Read Books.” Excellent advice.

I nodded. It was interesting, I thought, how little some things had changed in three hundred years. Here’s a situation where the government hires this guy to do its dirty work, he does part of the job but by mistake he creates a political problem for the government, so they try to get not only their money back, but also his fair share, then they frame him, and finally hang him. But somewhere along the line, most of the bucks slipped through their hands.

nodded, “A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.

When they send someone to interrupt a private conversation, it means that they weren’t able to eavesdrop.

As with real estate, what matters with bullet holes is location, location, location

early to bed, early to rise, makes a man sneaky and full of lies.

Anyway, The Plum Runner slipped through this narrow channel and into a small cove which looked artificial, as though it had been called into being, not by God Almighty, but by the Army Corps of Engineers, who liked to put the finishing touches on Creation.

the older you get, the more baggage you have to carry, and the less you’re able to lift it.

the past was so strong, it obscured the present.

I always thought that voluntary arms compliance inspections were sort of like a suspected murderer leading me on a guided tour of his house. No, Detective, there’s nothing in that closet of any interest. Now, let me show you my patio.

I’m a good Methodist and a bitch. But only once a month.

The skins have been sprayed. You should squeeze the pulp into your mouth. Here.” He handed me half the bunch. We walked along like old buds, squeezing grape pulp into our mouths—but not each other’s mouths. We weren’t that close yet.

As we say, if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

Princeton isn’t actually part of New Jersey. It’s a small island of wealth and intellectual eccentricity floating in the Sea of Central Megalopolis.

sigh

Maybe my ex-wife was right about meat. I tried to picture a life of soybean cheeseburgers, chile no carne, and hot dogs made out of seaweed. I’d rather die. All of a sudden I felt love and warmth for the Department of Agriculture.

As with real estate, what matters with bullet holes is location, location, location. Obviously these holes were in the right locations, because I was convalescing, not decomposing.

Actually, I called the town supervisor and got an okay to hire you, officially, as a consultant. A hundred bucks a day.” “Wow. Sounds like the kind of job I have to save up for.

Put up a winery and you get ten thousand wine-sipping yuppie slime from the nearest urban center.

Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.

The last big deadly human influenza epidemic in the world was in 1918. There were about twenty million dead worldwide, including five hundred thousand in the United States. Based on our present population, the equivalent number of dead now would be approximately one and a half million people. Could you imagine such a thing today? And the 1918 virus wasn’t particularly virulent, and of course, travel was much slower then and less frequent. Today, the highways and skyways can spread an infectious virus around the world in days.

So exhausting, the whole business of motherhood. It was a business, too, complete with compromises and disappointing returns for your investments, with budgets and schedules and task lists and surly underlings.

Don’t spend your whole life waiting for someday to come,” he’d told Gigi on that trip. “You never know when you’re going to run out of time.

I returned to shower and dress with particular care. I intended to dazzle Meg Trumble with sartorial splendor, which was why I selected a knitted shirt of plum-colored Sea Island cotton and a linen sport jacket of British racing green. Slacks of fawn silk. Cordovan loafers. No socks. I displayed this costume at the family cocktail hour. “Good God!” my father gasped. I prayed Meg would be more favorably impressed by my imitation of a male bower bird.

typical male postcoital mood, thinking I should be sleeping or leaving.

She was beginning to think that the death of somebody you loved was like throwing rocks in a pond. Piles and piles of rocks: the ripples kept on spreading, disrupting the smooth surface of your life long after you’d lost track of where, exactly, the rocks went into the water.

Maybe, no matter what right thing you tried to do, your action would be the wrong thing for somebody

The tide will come in and there won’t be any more footprints. It’s like our lives, right? Whatever we do before this moment in time, we can’t do over. We have no choice in life but to keep moving ahead.

He told me I could live in a corner of the world, like I was doing now, and think I was happy, or I could live in the whole world and know where I belonged,” Peter said.

life.

One of the principal articles of diet, in certain seasons of the year, is the fruit of a cactus called the Indian fig, which grows wild in all parts of the island. One sees it everywhere, either by the roadside, where it is used for hedges, or clinging to the steep cliffs on the mountainside. The fruit, which is about the size and shape of a very large plum, is contained in a thick, leathern skin, which is stripped off and fed to the cattle. The fruit within is soft and mushy and has a rather sickening, sweetish taste, which, however, is greatly relished by the country people.

Being a mother was like being a ship’s figurehead: you had to keep moving forward through the waves and weather, your head high, even when an iceberg was clearly on the horizon, too big to go around.

Are you a wine connoisseur?” “No. Are you?” “Yes. I can tell the difference between a Merlot and a Budweiser. Blindfolded.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

She supposed it was a universal truth that mothers, after tearing out their hair and tacking their raw beating hearts to the outsides of their clothing for anyone to see, were given no warning that some-day their baby-holding days would be over.

Daughters of the American Revolution don’t have group sex because they don’t want to have to write all those thank-you notes.

The convenient thing about biological warfare has always been easy deniability, and its untraceable origins.

I think if I worked with the stuff they worked with, I, too, wouldn’t make any long-range plans. Hell, I wouldn’t even buy green bananas.

There are many options in life, but one option you should never choose is the “Voice Warning and Advisory Option.

I’d once seen in The Wall Street Journal where a school guidance counselor says to two parents, “Your son is vicious, mean-spirited, dishonest, and likes to spread rumors. I suggest a career in journalism.

I never realized the Department of Agriculture was involved in national security. Do you have, like, undercover cows?

tell you, the older you get, the more baggage you have to carry, and the less you’re able to lift it.

I hit him with a left hook, and he toppled back onto the grass.

I don’t know much about auto mechanics, and Jack the Ripper didn’t know much about anatomy.

I wanted to disable the vehicle, but the cab doors were locked, and the engine hood was latched from the inside. Damn. I crawled under the high chassis and drew my knife. I don’t know much about auto mechanics, and Jack the Ripper didn’t know much about anatomy.

In short, drugs are the worst thing that has happened to American law enforcement since Prohibition.

Because the genetic makeup of a virus has to be able to… well, mesh with a cell to infect it. Human cells do not mesh with FMD virus.” Beth said, “But there’s some evidence that Mad Cow Disease has infected humans.

Reading is great. It allows you to travel the world without leaving the house, it widens your perspective. It gives more than it takes, an absolutely worthwhile investment. Everyone should read more.

And, there are only two possible conclusions: tragic failure, or riding off into the sunset together. But no matter how the journey ends, you know from the moment that you decide to crush on someone that the process won’t be entirely sweet nor bitter; the choice to like someone is yours, and the decision to cross the mountains and rivers is yours too.

The wonderful thing about America is that there are more antiques in circulation than were originally made.

If she’d been one of the crew on the Titanic, she’d have made everyone sign for the life jackets.

Yes, we say challenged.” “Then what happens? They become less than well, then go into an involuntary nonbreathing mode?

People her age had some baggage; people my age have whole warehousesful of steamer trunks.

I counted ten men, all dressed in some sort of blue uniform, and either they were the Department of Agriculture band, sent out to greet me, or they were the night security guards

he looked like one of those whistle and clipboard types: short blond hair, icy blue eyes, Mr. Can-Do, ex-jock, fit and trim, ready to organize a sporting event or assign people to boxcars, whatever needed doing.

though it had been called into being, not by God Almighty, but by the Army Corps of Engineers, who liked to put the finishing touches on Creation.

but if you don’t know where you’re going or why, you’re either a government employee or you’re aimless.

It occurred to me that the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.

Nobody outside a marriage can really know what’s happening on the inside of it.

nobody escapes this sick feeling that comes with discovering, over and over again, that the people you love are not who you thought they were.

To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation. Once on Lochnagar, we had watched the dawn light strike the Cairngorms, like the blue bloom on plums. Each scarp and gully was translucent, no smallest detail blurred. A pure, clear sun poured into each recess. But looking south, we caught our breath. For the world had vanished. There was nothing but an immense stretch of hummocked snow. Or was it sea? It gleamed, and was the high hills as the sea washes rock.