Ryan Howard Quotes

[P]ersonally, I know I’d prefer to read an honest review by someone who has no reason to lie, than a book reviewer who has an employer and a publishing house to keep happy.

None of us know what we're capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.

These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.

You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it's the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

When you find him, you’ll probably be shocked at just how much of nothing he really is.

Do you ever think that maybe you have your shit together, it's just that your shit doesn't look like everyone else's?

Dividing people into good and evil is just lazy.

Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most.

It’s not secrets I like. It’s discovering things that are new to me but actually were always there. Secrets are a different thing. They’re destructive.

Fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth.

I had really begun to understand why people overeat. It isn't what they eat, it's why they eat it: because when you feel literally full from food, it's a brief respite from feeling figuratively empty inside.

We have these stories we tell ourselves—and other people—about ourselves, based on what happened to us in the past, or what we did, or decisions we made, and then they become our future just by the telling. It’s like a …” “Self-fulfilling prophecy?” she offers. “Yeah. We want things to be different but we start by telling the other person how they were the last time, and that kind of, like, limits us to being that person again ... I suppose what I'm saying is that, for once, I’d like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.

They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation.

Corruption plagued the force just as it did every other area of society. If it was noticed, it took a brave and principled member to report it, but it did happen.

Jim opened the book. Its spine cracked loudly, like a bone.

Women were clearly the common denominator. His first three attacks focused on a woman and there was no attack that didn’t include one.

All of Jim’s work, his caution, his skills, his planning, his genius – it was all being undone by two overgrown children. How fucking infuriating.

When you’re twelve years old, adult life seems like an endless adventure – or rather, your adult life feels like it will be.

Howard Hughes, like so many wealthy people, died in an asylum of his own making.

The world, she’d discovered, just wasn’t designed for people with open wounds.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.

There was an especially acute heartbreak in having secured the job you’d dreamed of having for more than half your life only to discover that, firstly, it was nothing like you’d imagined it would be and then that, secondly, it had never really been your dream job at all.

But here’s the kicker: people don’t just read true-crime books now, they study them. They go looking for more. They listen to podcasts and meet up at conventions and trade theories’ – Bernadette mimed typing on a computer keyboard – ‘online until all hours of the night. Armies of armchair sleuths.

We let our fathers carry our stuff up into our new rooms and our mothers make up our beds with new linen, something we probably wouldn’t do in a few months’ time after a single gender studies module convinced us we knew more about the world than our parents had learned from decades of living in it.

And I actually think that’s probably not that unusual a reaction. I mean, that’s why cars slow down when they’re passing a traffic accident, right? Or why people watch true-crime documentaries, or read books about Ted Bundy. This stuff is, in a weird way, exciting. Right?’ ‘You think that’s what Liz is?’ I said. ‘Excited?

I didn’t want to go but I had no choice in the matter. I was too young and too numb to recall the journey, leaving me utterly lost, disoriented, and unable to find my way back. I’m still here. Until recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would be forever. But something unexpected has happened. A visitor has arrived and he knows the way back. He says he’ll take me with him. We leave soon. I’m finally getting to go home.

Someone would later tell me that denial, the first stage of grief, isn’t big and simple, like refusing to accept that someone is dead when all the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that they are. No. The real work of denial, the true intricacy of it, takes place beneath the thoughts your consciousness articulates in the nanoseconds before it does. It happens when you are presented with a set of circumstances that any person not in denial would immediately find worrying but, because you are in the midst of it, the roots of every fear bend and break, re-forming into plausible possibilities that cause you no concern. Denial is forcing boring, pedestrian explanations out of your synapses, growing them thick and uncontrolled like vines on a time-lapse video. Constantly and quickly, so nothing logical has a chance to squeeze through.

You open your door one evening to find a uniformed police officer standing outside. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. This is just a courtesy call. There’s been a burglary in the area and they’re just letting you know so your home isn’t next. Lock your doors and windows. Keep valuables out of view. Think about installing an alarm. You chat for a few minutes. You might mention the door at the back that doesn’t lock. Or that fact that you live here alone. Or that the couple who owns this construction site is living here while the work goes on—or, well, one of them is, because her husband is going back to San Francisco for a few weeks next week. Maybe you don’t reveal any information, but while you speak he’s still gathering it. The integrity of the front-door lock. The layout of the ground floor. Whether or not he likes the look of you. If he’d like to do to you what he’s already done to the others. That’s how he was choosing them, we felt sure. Donning a Garda uniform and doing door-to-door calls in the aftermath of a real burglary. But was he really a guard? Neither Tom nor Johnnie could remember seeing a Garda car, and we thought it would be relatively easy to convince a member of the public that you were wearing a Garda uniform when in actual fact you were wearing an approximation of one. He could’ve also easily gotten hold of a real uniform—if he was prepared to murder innocent people, he was probably willing to steal items of clothing too. Moreover this behavior would have been an incredible risk for a serving member to take, when one phone call to the local station would’ve been all it took to bring his little rogue scouting missions crashing down.

bought me a ticket to a planet where I had to live by myself.

Time was a kind editor.

on?

The only way you can lose your own shadow is to stand in the dark. The problem is, Oliver hates the dark.

There might be a difference between killing and being a killer.

We want things to be different but we start by telling the other person how they were the last time, and that kind of, like, limits us to being that person again... I suppose what I'm saying is that, for once, I'd like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.

Momentum was what was with me. Figuring out the waitlist connection, talking to Heather, putting everything together – it felt like a rush, a flood of adrenalin that was still pulsing through my veins, urging me not to sit

I was just so tired of this, of Liz’s little mood swings. When she was happy, she was such fun to be around. We were best friends, really. I felt better after seeing her.

It’s when you have a friend,’ Amanda said, ‘who is really nice, like, most of the time, but then they’ll suddenly say something mean or rude, like a little jab, a little sting, and then they just carry on as if nothing has happened and you’re left there thinking, Did something just happen or am I imagining it? Didn’t you ever see Bridget Jones?

On the flight on the way here I’d overheard the passengers seated in front of me talking about how affordable rental properties were so scarce in Dublin, people on shift-work were time-sharing bedsits.

She doesn’t understand, that’s the problem. Young girls today, they’re so careless. They don’t realise what kind of creeps are out there, what those monsters might do with all this information they’re volunteering, posting out there in the world. He’d tried telling them, taking them aside and explaining it to them, but then they just mistook him for being one of those.

Not just because of what I’d said to Liz, but because this feeling now – this pain – wasn’t pure grief. It was shame, too. Regret. Guilt. Embarrassment. It was about me. My pain was egocentric. Thinking about myself first and foremost, even now. Which only made me feel more of those things. At some point

The Nothing Man was back in the news and bringing a different kind of enthusiast to Covent Court: the true-crime tourist.

Secrets are a different thing. They're destructive.

Our robot overlords are coming regardless, but I'm not going to hold the door open for them.

Do you ever think that maybe you have your shit together, it's just that your shit doesn't look like everybody else's?

The tote is blue and has a space shuttle on it, piggybacking on an airplane as it flies over the skyscrapers of Manhattan. She lifts the bag and looks at it, then back at him. “Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—

San Francisco could lay claim to the highest rate of vehicle break-ins and burglaries in the whole of the United States. Now here she was in a little Irish country town where the word crime only had to stretch to cover incidents of public drunkenness and drink-driving, and she was being raped by a masked man in her own bed.

Sometimes he wished he’d put more effort into cultivating friends or hobbies, or even just pretending to, so that he could announce he was off on a golf weekend or going out for a couple of hours to meet someone for coffee. But he hadn’t, and it was too late now. He’d never expected there to be a need for it, not at this hour of his life.

Almost as soon as he was on the job, Healy began a slide into bleak disillusionment. He found himself in an organisation bloated by bureaucracy and infected with levels of laziness and corruption that, in his eyes, it had no feasible way to recover from.

When I told people this, I invariably got the same reaction: disgust. Staying in the house where my family were slaughtered? What kind of sicko would want to do that?

A hugely disproportionate amount of it, which thrusts investigations into the spotlight from the get-go, which in turn amps up the pressure on police to make progress, fast.

That room was an airlock between my life as I knew it and my life as I feared it would be from now on.

Oh, and by the way, I hated Inside. And just FYI, women do not go around all day thinking about how good their bras feel. That reviewer was right.

Everything is so much easier when he stays away from other people. The only way you can lose your own shadow is to stand in the dark. The problem is, Oliver hates the dark.

and that you couldn’t go there without meeting someone you knew or someone who knew you.

Discipline is choosing between what you want and what you want the most.

But you don’t know it, don’t realize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

Do you think people can change, Shiv? Like, really change? At their core?" Her sister sighs so hard it sounds like a gale blowing down the line. "What does that even mean, 'at their core'? What does a person changing actually look like? How would you know if they did?" "They'd act differently. Different to how you'd expect them to." "Based on what?" "Based on how they'd acted in the past." "I think people can change their habits and behaviors," Siobhan says carefully, as if she's on the stand in a courtroom, testifying for the defense, and the hot-shot prosecutor has just tried to trip her up with a cleverly worded question. "And sometimes their mind and their beliefs. People get older and wiser and have more experiences, and that all updates their... let's call it their central operating system. Because everything they do they learned in the first place, right? No one is born being X, Y, or Z. And theoretically, if you can learn how to be a certain way, you can unlearn it, too. But at the same time, you can't erase the past. You can lock it in a box and put that box away, but you can't make it disappear.

Like the club’s third investor Ray Ryan, who had met Holden through game hunting, Hirschmann was a wily entrepreneur with a Saint Bernard’s nose for sniffing out profitable business opportunities. It was not coincidence that their paths converged; it was causal, meaning that the three men initiated a specific plan of action, which had deliberate consequences. Like all success stories, the club’s efforts to recruit affluent members from around the world were the result of expert planning and timing.

There were no witnesses to the explosion and no immediate suspects. But the victim provided investigators with plenty of clues, beginning with his name: Ray Ryan, and an out-of-town address in Bermuda Dunes – sixteen miles from Palm Springs, California. The killing occurred less than one month before Ryan was to appear in a Washington, DC, court on charges of fraud and tax evasion.

While Ryan was building his financial kingdom, various government officials and high-ranking criminals studied his movements. For two decades, mobsters had been keeping score of Ryan’s growing income. In their view, it added up to a lot of payoffs and they intended to collect what they felt he owed them. Holden had witnessed this kind of behavior on a smaller scale in Hollywood, where a shaky alliance existed between gangsters and movie stars. In a haze of vodka, he remembered the fateful day that Ryan had described to him.

When Holden learned about Ryan’s dilemma, he was deeply perturbed. “You can’t let the Mob push you around,” Holden told him. “They’ll destroy you.” “It’s my own fault,” admitted Ryan. “I should never have got involved with them.” “Damn it, you need to go to the police,” said Holden. Ryan reported the extortion attempt to the FBI, saying he refused to be shaken down by a bunch of crooks. Ryan’s only option, the Bureau informed him, was to press charges in federal court. The FBI gave Ryan round-the-clock protection, and he hired an armed bodyguard who followed him everywhere. Nothing deterred him, not even warnings from Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana that, if he persisted in his court action, they would alert the IRS to go after him. During the ensuing trial, Ryan testified that he believed he was the victim of a setup. He had been the object of shakedowns in the past, Ryan told the court, but he had never paid anyone a penny. The judge believed him. Caifano received a ten year sentence and Delmonico got five years. The two men went to prison in 1966.

When he turned the key in the ignition, there was a blinding flash followed by total blackness. In that brief instant, Ryan knew his life was over. Two days later, William Holden attended a memorial service for Ray Ryan at the Ziemer Funeral Home East Chapel with its tall white colonnades and trimmed green lawn. The service was held in the presence of several uniformed police officers and undercover FBI agents, one of whom posed as a window washer across the street. Ryan’s ashes were taken to Africa, where his tearful widow Helen Kelley scattered them at the base of Mount Kenya. Afterwards, Holden called Adnan Khashoggi and told him he wanted to sell the Safari Club. “Why?” Khashoggi asked. “Because it’s no fun anymore.

World War II defined a generation. Howard Mansfield’s book I Will Tell No War Stories tells a moving personal and family story, and, in doing so, tells the story of that generation and of America itself. This is a wonderful book. — Robert Rodat, screenwriter, Saving Private Ryan

Maybe all interviewers aren’t trying to be Terry Gross, but maybe they are trying to be Joe Rogan, Ellen, Trevor Noah, Ryan Seacrest, Oprah, Howard Stern—or anyone else they admire and think they should emulate. But too often, interviewers try to play a role rather than simply be themselves.

Sometimes we put ourselves in places that only we can get out of!

You know what’s funny?’ He laughed now, a soulless, mechanical sound. ‘All this time, I’m sitting here thinking that I hurt you, and it turns out that you fucking did this to me.’ His face crumpled. ‘You did this to me. I loved you and you’re the one who did this to me …

It’s a manageable feeling with an end date when that person is coming back, but a drowning depth of pain and hopelessness when they are not. It might be interminable. I couldn’t even say if it would ever end, or even fade. How could I even face the future like this? What if I always felt this way? How could anyone learn to live with this?

A face like

that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t realize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day. She wonders what that does to a person.

People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course.

Jen is growing uncomfortable. Her brow is furrowed. He watches as she clasps her hands between her thighs and hunches her shoulders. She shifts her weight on the couch. Her gaze fixes on each of the three smokers in turn, studying their faces. Does she know any of them? She turns her head to take in the rest of the room— And stops. She’s seen them.

He can’t let her go by herself. And he won’t, because he’s a gentleman. A gentleman who doesn’t let young girls walk home alone from parties when they’ve been drinking enough to forget their coat, bag and – he lifts the flap on the little velvet envelope, checks inside – keys, college ID and phone too.

You know “lucky charms” is more of an American thing, right? A breakfast cereal? We don’t actually say that.’ ‘Is a rant about “Patty’s Day” coming next?

I went here.’ I took another sip of my drink, forgetting that it tasted like something they make you drink in a hospital

If you mean deaths in the parish and the year on next-door’s car, then yeah. As for actual news, no.’ I looked from one detective to the other. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what’s happened because obviously something has?

was armed and ready to blame Detective Malone. He’d guilted me into it, made me feel like I’d have those girls’ blood on my hands too if I didn’t fly back here and talk to Will. And coming here was the right thing to do. Wasn’t it?

Because you might manage to save a life this time, instead of being responsible for the taking of five because you were too stupid, too naïve, too in love to see that the boy in your bed was a murderous psychopath.

Did he really think I’d escaped all this intact? That I could love him and he could kill people and then I could just go on and live a normal life? That I could have those things now, no harm done? Didn’t he realise what he’d done?

I was therefore absolved of all responsibility when it came to determining his guilt. All I had to do was accept the verdict of the ones who were responsible for such decisions and as nonsensical as it had once seemed to me, I didn’t see that I had any choice but to do exactly that. ‘I don’t see why – or how – him suddenly changing his mind ten years later changes anything.

Because of bad memories. Because of the constant threat of someone realising who I am and asking me about him. Because every girl I went to school with, it seemed to me, had efficiently done all the things you’re supposed to do by now – get coupled up, borrow the price of a house, add to the population – leaving me standing out like some unwanted, spinster thumb. Because

Jesus Christ.’ I stood up and started making a loop around the table, just because I couldn’t stay still any more. ‘Are you serious? Your big concern here is that I don’t have a boyfriend? Not everyone wants the same things, Mam. And guess what? It’s not the fucking Fifties.

It was about the size of a half-dozen egg carton, and just as clunky. Sharp corners, thick buttons, sliding switches (switches!) and a matchbox-sized screen. Its dull grey case was heavily scratched and the strap was missing. I pressed the ON button but nothing happened, the batteries inside long dead.

I just want a chance to try to convince you of who I am before you find out what I did, before

The residents are used to living above and below and beside other people’s entire lives while pretending to be utterly unaware of them; hearing each other’s TVs and smelling each other’s cooking but never learning each other’s names.

Hey, McFly!" Has Biff returned??  No!  It turns out that Howard, George's neighbour, is there!  And he wants to sell him Girl Scout cookies!

Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.