Russian Roulette Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Russian Roulette. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said. Why not?" Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.
Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals)
A certain wise man once said that God didn't play dice with the universe, but that man was wrong. Sometimes I think He must even try Russian roulette.
Daína Chaviano (The Island of Eternal Love)
I don't do romance, in the same way I don't do heroin Russian roulette, or nude alligator wrestling. I consider all of the above self-destructive, and demeaning and these are things up with which I will not put.
D.D. Barant (Dying Bites (The Bloodhound Files, #1))
A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun—aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.
David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence)
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.
Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)
I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
We all make choices, Cossack. Who we are in this world, what we do in it. Generous or selfish. Happy or sad. Good or evil. It's all down to choice.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Looking back now, I would say that this was one of the first valuable lessons I learned, and one that would be useful in my future line of work. Sometimes things go wrong. It is inevitable. But it is a mistake to waste time and energy worrying about events that you cannot influence. Once they have happened, let them go.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
THE LANTERN IN THE LIFEBOAT I am nervous. I’m afraid. But I will stand here in the white hot heat of you. I will play Russian roulette with your playlists. I will tell jokes I’m not sure you’ll find funny. I will hold on until there is no more reason to. And in the end, I will break the stars and resurrect the sun.
pleasefindthis (I Wrote This For You)
Let's play Russian roulette. If you win, I give you a Colombian necktie.
Natalya Vorobyova (Better to be able to love than to be loveable)
But, the source explained, this fit Putin’s larger strategic vision: “to destroy NATO, destroy the European Union, and seriously harm the United States.
Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)
Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ...It really depends on your perspective.
China Miéville (Un Lun Dun)
Heck, who needs things like skydiving and rock climbing for your adreline kick, if you can get it from playing Russian roulette with open windows?
Traveller
In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the Neo-Con-Artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defence, three times more for gasoline and home-heating oil and twice what we payed for health-care. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health-care, their pensions; trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war payed for with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the President's oil men are maneuvering on Iraq's oil. Borrowed money to bomb bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. No money to rebuild bridges in America. Borrowed money to start a hot war with Iran, now we have another cold war with Russia and the American economy has become a game of Russian roulette.
Dennis Kucinich
The last time you came to see me there were anchors in your eyes, hardback books in your posture. You were the five star general of sureness, a crisp white tuxedo of a man. I was fiddling with my worn coat pockets, puffing false confidence ghosts in the cold January air. My hands were shitty champagne flutes brimming with cheap merlot. I couldn’t touch you without ruining you, so I didn’t touch you at all. It’s when you’re on the brink of something that you lose your balance. You told me that once. When I can’t bring myself to say what I need to, my heart plays Russian Roulette with my throat. I swear I fired that night, but, nothing. Someday, I’ll show you the bullet I had for you, after time has done the wash. I’ll take it out of the jar of missed opportunities. We’ll hold it up to the light. You’ll roll it around your mouth like a fallen tooth. You won’t forgive me exactly, but we’ll laugh about how small it is. We’ll wonder how such a little thing could ever have meant so much.
Mindy Nettifee
I've played Romeo for Juliet (But in depth) It's vignettes of silhouettes (And then read) And watched Russian roulette, yeah red Soviet Yet doing it simultaneously While dropping down shed oubliettes Turned around and took truth to the head that Love is the ugliest thing too beautiful for death
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
When you vote, you play Russian Roulette with a magazine fed pistol.
Tom Wallace
When you're mortal, life is nothing more than a drawn-out game of Russian Roulette. Every moment is the spin of a gun cylinder, every decision pointing the barrel at your head. Over and over, again and again, you pull the trigger, hoping it won't be your last turn in the game.
J.M. Darhower (Reignite (Extinguish, #2))
When your business is death, the only death you should never consider is your own.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin (Alex Rider Book 10))
You must control your emotions. You must control your feelings. If there is any fear or insecurity, you must destroy it before it destroys you. It is not the size or the strength of your opponent that matters. These can be measured. It is what cannot be measured...courage, determination...that count.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
As Leo had said to me, none of us knew what our crime was, but reading the book was certainly a punishment. The
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin (Alex Rider Book 10))
Awe! Leaving so soon?” Gabby said sweetly, holding the door open. “I was just about to pull out the gun for you to play single-player Russian Roulette.
Laura Kreitzer (Keepers (Timeless, #3.5))
Loading new software into new computers and using it for the first time was like playing Russian roulette. It demanded and got a lot of respect.
Gene Kranz (Failure is not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond)
Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to play Russian roulette with our planet’s future with the bullet you’ve so thoughtfully provided. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t see you out.
John Scalzi (The Android's Dream)
by huge, solid trunks with the sky blotted out
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette: The Story of an Assassin (Alex Rider Book 10))
The computer, however, had been authorized to receive the message, and Yassen saw three words. KILL ALEX RIDER They were exactly what he had expected.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Woman is like a russian roulette", i've used to say, "it doesn't matter how many you dodge away or find the ones that would steal your breath and makes you sweat, at the end of the day, the fatal one always finds you. It is simply the law of the Love Gun.
Mladen Đorđević (Svetioničar - Vesnici oluje (Utočište #1))
I can’t win. Love is Russian roulette for me. No one loves the real me inside. they're all in love with my fame, my stardom. I fall in love far too quickly and end up getting hurt all the time. I've got scars all over. But I can't help myself because basically I'm a softie I have this hard, macho shell — which I project on stage but there's a much softer side. too, which melts like butter.
Freddie Mercury
Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
You mean something like ‘truth or dare’? I haven’t played that in a long time.” She didn’t think he would ever get himself entangled in a game like that, but it was addictive, a compromising icebreaker featuring all the strategy of Poker, minus the cards, mixed with a dash of danger from Russian Roulette, without the revolver.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1))
the covers, I tried to persuade myself that everything would be all right. It was the beginning of the longest night of my life. I took off my outer clothes and lay down on the second bunk but I couldn’t sleep. I was frightened that the fire would go out. I was
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Consider a more extreme example than the casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian roulette a single time for a million dollars—this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has an 83.33 percent chance of gains, for an “expected” average return per shot of $833,333. But if you keep playing Russian roulette, you will end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is … not computable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
We used our imagination to create a world of wolves and vampires, ghosts and Cossack warriors—and we chased each other right through the middle of them.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Marriage, it's like roulette: Sometimes one wins, often one loses. Even if you're very in love, it can still go bad.
Marjane Satrapi (Embroideries)
Comedian Red Skelton once defined Congress as "bingo with billions." These days, it's more like Russian roulette.
Lauren M. Bloom
Don't play Quantum Russian Roulette.
Sean Carroll (Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime)
Victor knew he was playing a dangerous game. The odds were terrible, the stakes monumental. It was Russian roulette, except that a bullet would be a cleaner end.
V.E. Schwab (Vengeful (Villains, #2))
She's a russian roulette queen, gambling in love with her heart and life on the line
Jennifer Megan Varnadore
In one of the meetings, Clapper said that he was worried that Russia might respond with cyberattacks against America’s critical infrastructure—and possibly shut down the electrical grid.
Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)
Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
The dial revolves like the chamber of a six-shooter, and suddenly turning from station to station becomes a harmless form of Russian roulette. If I change the channel, I might miss something. If I don’t, I might miss something on one of the other channels. I start to understand why Bill kept them all running simultaneously. At the same time, while we’re all sitting around waiting for something to happen on the television, the world outside is passing us by. Imagine how many things flicker into and out of existence while we wait for incoming transmissions.
Kirk Jones (Aetherchrist)
The rest of us have to play along with God’s little game of Russian roulette, His eternal lesson to live it up while you can. And far be it for me to turn away from God—let’s get a drink.
Pamela L Hamilton (Lady Be Good Lib/E: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale)
If this is love . . . real love . . . like I’ve always thought, it’s nothing more than a vicious game of Russian roulette. The gun clicks when it comes to you, and you cringe in anticipation that this may just be the last breath you take, but then it continues on, until the next round . . . and the next. Then there’s that one time when it clicks and hits you, and you just can’t walk away.
Claire Contreras (Kaleidoscope Hearts (Hearts, #1))
Dangerous forces were let loose on the land that day, and I was there, not just complicit, but an active and cynical participant in the game of Russian roulette the United States of America was about to play.
Michael Cohen (Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump)
If you engaged in a Russian roulette–type strategy with a low probability of large loss, one that bankrupts you every several years, you are likely to show up as the winner in almost all samples—except in the year when you are dead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
I'm not afraid of flying. Once you get on a plane, you hand your life over to the pilots and hope they know what the hell they're doing. If you reach your destination in one piece, you get your life back, and on you go - Russian Roulette with wings.
Stewart Stafford
It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary. We expire in the lazy, utterly helpless drift, the spongy warmth of an absolute uncertainty. Where nothing is ever true, or right or wrong, there are no problems; where life is meaningless we are free from responsibility, the way a slave or scavenger is free. Futility breeds carelessness, against which stands the stark alternative: against the radical uncertainty by which modern man has lived – as in a game of Russian roulette, stifled in the careless “now” between the click and the explosion, living by the dull grace of empty chambers – the risk of certainty. —John Senior, Ph.D.
John Senior (The Death of Christian Culture)
Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate.
Frederik Pohl
Bob exploded. 'There is no such thing as a casual conversation with my mother. Every single word will be twisted recognition until before you know it you're playing Russian roulette in a wind tunnel with a psychotic dwarf, having wagered your birthright for a piece of cheese...
Meg Rosoff (There Is No Dog)
In a way, I think I am writing this for Leo. I have decided to keep a record of my life because I suspect my life will be short. I do not particularly want to be remembered. After all, being unknown has been essential to my work. But I sometimes think of him and I would like him to understand what it was that made me what I am.
Anthony Horowitz (Russian Roulette (Alex Rider, #10))
Heroin has a frightening reputation, and rightly so: the margin between an effective dose and an overdose is narrower than that of any other mainstream narcotic. A paper in Addiction, an academic journal, estimated the quantity of various drugs needed to get an average person high versus the amount required to kill them.5 In the case of alcohol, it found that the ratio was about ten to one—in other words, if a couple of shots of vodka are enough to make you tipsy, twenty shots might kill you, if you can keep them down. Cocaine, it found, was slightly safer, with a ratio of fifteen to one. LSD has a ratio of 1,000 to one, whereas marijuana is safest of all: it is impossible to die of overdose, as far as anyone can tell. Even with the edibles, there is no evidence that one can die of overdose—you simply have a stronger and longer-lasting effect than you may have wanted. For heroin, the ratio between an effective dose and a deadly one is just six to one. Given that batches vary dramatically in their purity, each shot is a game of Russian roulette. Dealers
Tom Wainwright (Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel)
Life is like playing russian rulette with a loaded rifle, it doesnt matter what you do, you always get the bullet.
Jaime Tenorio Valenzuela
Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.
Paul Collier (The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It)
Okay, we need to make it clear right now how you should act when you feel like dishing out orders to me. Step one: Hesitate before you decide to throw your metaphorical dick around. Step two: Hesitate again, reminding yourself just how useless it would be to exert authority over me. Step three: repeat the first two steps at least once. If all else fails, go play Russian Roulette with a fully loaded pistol, because it’ll save me the trouble of shooting you in the face.
Suzanne Wright (When He’s Dark (The Olympus Pride #1))
I just want to tell my story. Because this is what I do. I play Russian roulette with Fate, knowing someday a therapist will break confidentiality and turn me in. It’s like when I was a child, weighed down by guilt over some wrongdoing but fearing the punishment too much to confess outright. I’d drop clues, reasoning that if I was meant to be caught, those hints would chamber the round. Magical, childish thinking, but it’s what I do now. I tell my story and reason that if I’m truly meant to be punished, a therapist will turn me in.
Kelley Armstrong (City of the Lost (Rockton, #1))
Your father says the boy lost his mother,” she said. She was washing lettuce in the sink and shouting above the water. “No, not quite. She made a suicide attempt, but she’s okay.” Marta shook her head. “Oh, they always succeed sooner or later. How hard can it be? This is a crazy country, that people want to kill themselves. Other countries, people struggle to stay alive every day, they run between the bullets, they eat five little pieces of rice, and here the people say, Oh, stay alive in this beautiful country with lots to eat? No thank you, not for me.” I was sure there were plenty of suicides back in the country that invented Russian roulette, but now was not the time to say
Rebecca Makkai (The Borrower)
if you're reading this, I'm probably gone by now. I used to reside in your heart, but I had to move out recently. between you and me, it became a little too expensive to live there. it cost me too much happiness, and it cost me so much peace, and these are things I never budgeted for when you asked me to move in. the warmth I felt in the air when I first move in slowly turned cold, and even though I attempted several times to repair the broken windows and fix the energy between us, sometimes situations should be left alone before common ground is found. we've waited and waited, staring at clocks and hoping time can replace everything we've lost, but the only thing I've found is that it's best for me to pack my belongings and go. sleeping in a cold heart every day and hoping that it will warm up is like playing a game of russian roulette with my happiness, and I'm not trying to take any chances. so I moved out and came back to myself, and I can safely say there's no place like home.
Billy Chapata (Flowers on the Moon)
Look.I'm...uh...When you told me you'd looked at my stuff.I didn't...I shouldn't have..." What is it about those two words-I'm sorry-that makes otherwise articulate guys into babbling idiots? I mean, I love you, I get. That's a tough one, putting yourself so completely, nakedly out there. I haven't ever said that to a guy. A guy other than Frankie or my dad, anyway. But I'm sorry? I say it twenty times a day.To Nonna, when I just can't face a three-course breakfast at seven in the morning, to the half-dozen people I bump into on my frantic rush up those eight blocks to school. To Sadie, for having to copy her algebra homework for,like,the thousandth time, because I didn't get to mine. I'm still waiting for Leo to apologize for totalling my bike three years ago. I forgave him eventually. Riding a bike in the middle of the city is a little like playing RUssian roulette with a bus. Still, it would have been nice t have gotten an I'm sorry instead of a litany of excuses. I figure I'll be waiting forever.
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.
Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)
The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded". The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive-retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"-not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting withing plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious-the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860's intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays)
In the summer of 1914, he had headed to France in the company of his only son, Alistair. They were driving at high speed through woodland in Northern France when Alistair lost control of the wheel. The car spun into a roadside tree and flipped upside down. Alistair was flung from the vehicle and landed on his head. Cumming was trapped by his leg in a tangle of smouldering metal. ‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident, ‘and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car in order to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might, he could not free his smashed leg.’ If he was to have any hope of reaching his son, there was only one thing to do. He reached for his pocket knife and hacked away at his mangled limb ‘until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to the son and spread a coat over him.’ Nine hours later, Cumming was found lying unconscious next to his son’s dead body. His recovery was as remarkable as his survival. He was back at his desk within a month, brushing aside any outer shows of mourning for his son. Cumming had the ramrod emotional backbone that so typified the gentlemen of his social class and era. Just a few months after his accident, one of his operatives visited him at his offices on the top floor of Whitehall Court. Cumming, who had not yet received his artificial leg, was inching his substantial frame down six flights of stairs: ‘two sticks, and backside, edging its way down one step at a time.’ Little wonder that his friends described him as ‘obstinate as a mule.
Giles Milton (Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution)
The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded". The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive-retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"-not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious-the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860's intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays)
Let’s take the threshold idea one step further. If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things—things that have nothing to do with intelligence—must start to matter more. It’s like basketball again: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball-handling skills and shooting touch. So, what might some of those other things be? Well, suppose that instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a totally different kind of test. Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what’s called a “divergence test” (as opposed to a test like the Raven’s, which asks you to sort through a list of possibilities and converge on the right answer). It requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible. With a divergence test, obviously there isn’t a single right answer. What the test giver is looking for are the number and the uniqueness of your responses. And what the test is measuring isn’t analytical intelligence but something profoundly different—something much closer to creativity. Divergence tests are every bit as challenging as convergence tests, and if you don’t believe that, I encourage you to pause and try the brick-and-blanket test right now. Here, for example, are answers to the “uses of objects” test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named Poole at a top British high school: (Brick). To use in smash-and-grab raids. To help hold a house together. To use in a game of Russian roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time (bricks at ten paces, turn and throw—no evasive action allowed). To hold the eiderdown on a bed tie a brick at each corner. As a breaker of empty Coca-Cola bottles. (Blanket). To use on a bed. As a cover for illicit sex in the woods. As a tent. To make smoke signals with. As a sail for a boat, cart or sled. As a substitute for a towel. As a target for shooting practice for short-sighted people. As a thing to catch people jumping out of burning skyscrapers.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
It was the combination of many factors," Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn't get the girls out of his head. "With most people," he said, "suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty." But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
On Saturday, March 19, 2016, at 4:34 A.M., John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, received what looked like an email from Google about his personal Gmail account. “Hi John Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your Google Account,” read the email from “the Gmail Team.” It noted that the attempted intrusion had come from an IP address in Ukraine. The email went on: “Google stopped this sign-in attempt. You should change your password immediately.” The Gmail Team helpfully included a link to a site where Podesta could make the recommended password change. That morning, Podesta forwarded the email to his chief of staff, Sara Latham, who then sent it along to Charles Delavan, a young IT staffer at the Clinton campaign. At 9:54 AM that morning, Delavan replied, “This is a legitimate email. John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account… It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP.” Delavan later asserted to colleagues that he had committed a typo. He had meant to write that “this is not a legitimate email.” Not everybody on the Clinton campaign would believe him. But Delavan had an argument in his favor. In his response to Latham, he had included the genuine link Podesta needed to use to change his password. Yet for some reason Podesta clicked on the link in the phony email and used a bogus site to create a new password. The Russians now had the keys to his emails and access to the most private messages of Clinton World going back years.
Michael Isikoff (Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump)
In the last three months, I’ve started having creepy dreams that give me a glimpse of the future. Or sometimes a portal will open up in the middle of the night and something will try to kill me. There’s no way to know which one I’m gonna get hit with each day. It’s kinda like playing Russian roulette every night with a drunk who hates you.
Erica Cameron (Sing Sweet Nightingale (The Dream War Saga, #1))
He said, "You are the russian roulette of my casino." ..and I shot him dead, then and there with my russian roulette.. I am the Goddess of Russian Mafia..
Himmilicious
I play Russian roulette. That way, I only face UNCERTAIN death.
David Hammons (The Bean Straw: The Chicken Factor)
Are they in it for the money? Well, yes, to a degree. But these are good people, genuinely trying to make a difference, and if they are going to give up their Western comforts is it a moral imperative to earn the US$1.90 a day that locals get, or walk everywhere, eat badly and behave in ways that increase the risk of getting killed? I think not, but if you disagree, keep two bucks a day from what you earn and send the rest to Hamid, here at 444 Butcher Street. Oh, and play Russian roulette every week, to help get that local flavour.
Toby Ralph (Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special)
Russian Roulette, killer in all black.
Jasmine Sandozz (Thoughts of a Burning Heart)
When playing Russian roulette you don't relax when the gun clicks instead of fires. Especially when you're the only one playing.
The Behrg (Housebroken)
But we were playing Russian roulette with my ovaries and eventually my ovaries were going to succumb to the bullet.
Kristen Ashley (Rock Chick Renegade (Rock Chick, #4))
Above anything, I was angry at her and angry at Julius. They’d played Russian Roulette with their children’s lives and now we were dealing with the demons they’d created for us.
Porscha Sterling (Us Against the World 3: Forever in Love)
you is akin to playing Russian roulette: both hobbies have a high chance of ending in a fatality.” She
A.W. Exley (Nefertiti's Heart (Artifact Hunters, #1))
Lu ngga salah kok, milih untuk jadi 'dewasa' dengan cara-cara yang lu kenal, ketimbang hidup dalam kutipan orang-orang populer yang ngga relevan. Hidup cuma sekali. One way in, one way out. Ibarat maen 'Russian Roulette' tanpa kemungkinan selamat. Jadi, ngga masalah juga, lu bakal mati saat permainan atau setelah permainan. Lah, kapan mati aja ngga masalah, apalagi cuma bener salah boi.
Ayudhia Virga
If we conform our behavior to God’s ancient moral prescription, we are entitled to the sweet benefits of life. But if we defy its imperatives, then death is the inevitable consequence. AIDS is only one avenue by which sickness and death befall those who play Russian roulette with God’s eternal moral law.
James C. Dobson (Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future)
are the only ones. My, I mean, our parents passed away eight years ago, maybe six months apart.” She made a quick sign of the cross, in the Orthodox way, reverse order to the Irish Catholic
Mike Faricy (Russian Roulette (Dev Haskell Mystery, #1))
One in the Chamber [10w] Playing Russian roulette with your head is suicide for masochists. ಥ﹏ಥ ̿ ̿ ̿ ̿’̿’̵͇̿̿з
Beryl Dov
Taking a Chance with Romance I need your love to love you back, you ask the same of me, If neither of us will take the chance, we may both die of misery. Let me take first shot at it, better than wither in regret. I’ll be the gun and you’ll be the bullet, as love spins the cylinder of Russian roulette.
Beryl Dov
Trying socialism is like playing Russian Roulette with 5 of the 6 chambers loaded. That's the rate at which socialism manages to avoid extreme violence and oppression.
A.E. Samaan
Praying for something is like trying to increase your chances of surviving a game of Russian roulette by wearing a bulletproof vest.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Playing Russian Roulette puts you in a 1 in 6 chance of ending your life. Converting your nation’s economy to Socialism is about a 9 out of 10 chance that you will collapse the economy, eradicate your individual rights, and end life as you know it. Playing Russian Roulette is, incredibly, the more sane choice of the two.
A.E. Samaan
COVID-19 is like Russian Roulette, as it only occasionally kills infected people.
Steven Magee
As with the “You can prove anything with statistics” claim, I usually find that the people making these other irrational claims don’t even quite mean what they say, and their own choices will betray their stated beliefs. If you ask someone to enter a betting pool to guess the outcome of the number of heads in 12 coin tosses, even the person who claims odds can’t be assigned will prefer the numbers around or near six heads. The person who claims to accept no risk at all will still fly to Moscow using Aeroflot (an airline with a safety record worse than any U.S. carrier) to pick up a $1 million prize. In response to the skeptics of statistical models he met in his own profession, Paul Meehl proposed a variation on the game of Russian roulette.15 In his modified version there are two revolvers: one with one bullet and five empty chambers and one with five bullets and one empty chamber. Meehl then asks us to imagine that he is a “sadistic decision-theorist” running experiments in a detention camp. Meehl asks, “Which revolver would you choose under these circumstances? Whatever may be the detailed, rigorous, logical reconstruction of your reasoning processes, can you honestly say that you would let me pick the gun or that you would flip a coin to decide between them? Meehl summarized the responses: “I have asked quite a few persons this question, and I have not yet encountered anybody who alleged that he would just as soon play his single game of Russian roulette with the five-shell weapon.” Clearly, those who answered Meehl’s question didn’t really think probabilities were meaningless. As we shall see before the end of this chapter, Meehl’s hypothetical game is less “hypothetical” than you might think.
Douglas W. Hubbard (How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business)
Five out of five people agree that Russian Roulette is safe
Anonymous
Do you know the old question? Which came first, the alcoholic husband or the long-suffering wife?” “Can’t say that I do, but I know a couple or two it might fit.
Mike Faricy (Russian Roulette (Dev Haskell Mystery, #1))
Only once did Wilson talk in public about the pain of his depression. On May 7 [less than two weeks before he killed himself] he scrapped a prepared text on children and violence, and instead began revealing his own illness to a group of psychiatrists and other professionals at a meeting of the D.C. Mental Health Association. “We can talk about me being a politician, but we can also talk about me as a person who deals with depression, a very painful, very difficult disease … [that] leads to a great feeling of being lost, of a hole in your body,” he said. He told them the disease was particularly deadly in the black community, where people played “Russian roulette” with their lives, and said, “I believe that more people are dying of depression than are dying of AIDS, heart trouble, high blood pressure, anything else, simply because I believe depression brings on all of those diseases.” The audience was stunned, but according to association director Anita Sheldon, none of the people who came up to Wilson afterward talked to him about his illness.
Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)
My adolescent years were convoluted with ideas that chaos was good, that depression meant you were a creative person. My heroes were Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Nancy Spungen. Sylvia fucking Plath… playing Russian roulette with various dicks to make a point that I just didn’t fucking care. I was a mess. I was interesting.
Erica Garza (Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction)
The game is my version of Russian Roulette. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The rules are as follows. The gun will have one bullet in it. I will place the bullet in the chamber and spin it. We will then each take a turn pulling the trigger with the gun pointed at our heads. You’ll point the gun and pull the trigger on the children’s turns. We will continue to do this until one of us is dead. The
Ethan Cross (The Shepherd)
Despite what those on the happily coupled sidelines might think, 99 percent of online dates weren't exciting enough to be fun or nerve-racking enough to be adventurous. They were just...awkward. Boring. An hour of small talk with someone you'd think twice about saving from a burning building. Online dating was like Russian roulette. Mostly misses. But sometimes, people Evie knew had met that all-too-rare bullet: a smart, aesthetically pleasing New Yorker who was still single. Maybe tonight, Evie thought, is the night I blow my brains out.
Georgia Clark (The Regulars)
notion of alternative accounting: $ 10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $ 10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
the amateurs, who had come out to see what was doing in the Crimea, as they went other years to Norwegian fishing or Baden roulette, were scattered about in yachting costume, and stirred to a little excitement as the Russian shells began to burst among us, and the bombs to fall with thuds loud enough to startle the strongest nerves.
Ouida (Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26))
An important cousin of room for error is what I call optimism bias in risk-taking, or “Russian roulette should statistically work” syndrome: An attachment to favorable odds when the downside is unacceptable in any circumstances.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness)
Taking party drugs these days is playing Russian roulette and, unfortunately, your friend was unlucky and took a bullet." Thanks, Like picturing her with all the tubes sticking out isn't bad enough.
Vicki Grant
Are you going to play ‘Russian Roulette’ with COVID-19 or are you going to get vaccinated?
Steven Magee
COVID-19 plays ‘Russian Roulette’ with healthy people.
Steven Magee