Ross Lynch Quotes

Music is poetry with personality,

I was born to make mistakes, not to be perfect.

Music is poetry with personality

Like the waves need the sand to crash on, like the sun needs the world to shine on, you're the bright side of every day, me without you just isn't the same

Im looking for a girl who's fun to be around.

I have everything I need. I don't know if I need any more than what I have. Yes, I am pretty lucky.

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

It’s not in the interest of its competitors—Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citigroup, JP Morgan—because if Lehman were to fail, then the pressure moves to Merrill Lynch and

What he did to Merrill Lynch was absolutely criminal.

I’m a little uncomfortable talking about Merrill Lynch with John in the room.

if we think this is in the best interest of Merrill Lynch shareholders, we need to do it.

historian John Hope Franklin (a native of Tulsa, as it turned out) or his book From Slavery to Freedom (McGraw Hill, 1994). At Ross’s suggestion, Franklin’s book became the launching point for my crash course into black history, and I’m now of the opinion that it should be taught in every American high school. Until reading Franklin’s book, I was only vaguely aware of the horrors of slavery. I was almost completely ignorant of the terror and hardship that came with emancipation—the murderous rides of the original Ku Klux Klan; the reign of Jim Crow; thousands of lynchings; racial hatreds that were not only tolerated, but widely condoned and endorsed at

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.