Slater King Quotes

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story ‘Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points’ (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College, Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope’s School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia’s tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner.

Here’s the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that’s affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he’s not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant.” “How long?” someone yelled. Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.” “Why can’t you get him to leave?” “Because I can’t, that’s why,” Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. “Because I’m not Superman, all right? Look, he’s inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can’t get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?" Silence. “Yeah, I thought so. I can’t get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake.” “That’s your job,” Zil said. “Oh, I see,” Sam said. The resentment he’d held in now came boiling to the surface. “It’s my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What’s your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don’t know how we’d ever manage without you.” “Sam…,” Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning. Too late. He was going to say what needed saying. “And the rest of you. How many of you have done a single, lousy thing in the last two weeks aside from sitting around playing Xbox or watching movies? “Let me explain something to you people. I’m not your parents. I’m a fifteen-year-old kid. I’m a kid, just like all of you. I don’t happen to have any magic ability to make food suddenly appear. I can’t just snap my fingers and make all your problems go away. I’m just a kid.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he had crossed the line. He had said the fateful words so many had used as an excuse before him. How many hundreds of times had he heard, “I’m just a kid.” But now he seemed unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Look, I have an eighth-grade education. Just because I have powers doesn’t mean I’m Dumbledore or George Washington or Martin Luther King. Until all this happened I was just a B student. All I wanted to do was surf. I wanted to grow up to be Dru Adler or Kelly Slater, just, you know, a really good surfer.” The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public. “I’m doing the best I can,” Sam said. “I lost people today…I…I screwed up. I should have figured out Caine might go after the power plant.” Silence. “I’m doing the best I can.” No one said a word. Sam refused to meet Astrid’s eyes. If he saw pity there, he would fall apart completely. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labour passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures.

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It’s a concept I read about in some book, right before I was paralysed. I can’t control what happens to me, and I can’t control what people think about me. All I can focus on is what I can control, no matter how broken I am, no matter how much I’d love to play the victim. Playing the victim isn’t a task that benefits me in any way. What benefits me is persevering. So I separate everything I can potentially do into the tasks that have positive outcomes, and then I do only those things. I have no expectation of anything else. It helps me stop thinking about what could have been, because that’s useless, isn’t it? We’re living in this reality. All I can do is improve my circumstances as much as I can.

That’s what the weakest of the weak do. They blame everyone else. They shirk all responsibility. They do anything and everything to advance their own position in society, and if it all falls apart they throw their hands up in the air and say, “What else could I have done?

Progesterone is not a minimalist hormone. It leans toward excess, toward velvet, toward a thickening of the blood. Under its spell, the womb's endometrial mat goes from a thin brown covering to a thick crimson pile, a wild, expensive carpet, bedding fit for a king. No amount of money could buy a mattress with the thickness, the precision, the pure comfort that progesterone produces; here is where you started your first perfect sleep. Shhh.

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.” ​— ​Ambrose Bierce

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But she’d forgotten the most fundamental law of human nature. Men often think with their privates, and that makes them stupid.

King realised there was little separating a corporate sociopath from a violent sociopath, save for habits.

sometimes there’s jobs where I’d rather die in the process than live to see the results of my failure. This is one of those times.

You train like we train and devote your life to a single cause, and everything else is … inconsequential.

we’ve been conditioned our whole lives to focus on the physical, which transforms our bodies and minds. Everything else falls away.

Is that what gnaws at us? The fact that we think we’re decent people doing honest work, when we’re in the business of killing.

War is made of impossible choices.

What neat package of syllables could make up for what had torn their family apart?

But does it ever go the way you think it’s going to?

They’re not going to notice anything out of the ordinary, because everything’s out of the ordinary.

This is life. Sometimes it’s messy.

Well-trained combatants think there’s a way to adapt to any situation. And usually there is. But sometimes the stimuli becomes too much. Sometimes you get overwhelmed. Sometimes… …it all falls apart.

You’re only happy if you’re progressing.

happened

It’s the same everywhere, not just here. All you need to do is find those with nothing left to live for. Who think they’re just a cog in a machine and that life is passing them by. Offer them a life-changing sum of money to stick a knife in someone’s back and they’ll do it without blinking.

Correlation isn’t causation—

He didn’t think he’d ever get used to the sight of life sapping from a human being for as long as he lived.

Pain was nothing to them. It’s everything to most people, who shy away when it crops up in their lives. But both he and King had made a career out of going directly toward the pain, toward the suffering, in hopes of a better result when it came time to perform. It was eerily similar to what elite athletes go through before competition, only with more dire physical consequences. If they didn’t perform in the field, they didn’t get a participation trophy. They died. That translated to a sickening work ethic, and a pain tolerance practically unrivalled anywhere else on the planet. It meant that when one of them badly sprained their ankle, they taped it back up and kept soldiering on, no matter what it did to them mentally. Because all pain comes to an end. It can’t last forever.

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Is it because we have a conscience?’ he said. ‘Is that what it is? In this fucked-up world, with this fucked-up job, giving us these fucked-up memories. Is that what gnaws at us? The fact that we think we’re decent people doing honest work, when we’re in the business of killing.

eyes. A switch had flipped in his brain — something primal rising up, something that hadn’t been activated in a long time. Because he wasn’t exactly the most appealing package on the dating scene, but now there was some small part of his brain going, Wait — could you pull this off? Is she serious?

It’s never clean,’ she said. ‘It’s never black and white. But, yes, I think that’s what it is. We think we’re

She was the family he’d never be able to have. She was the shred of humanity he’d held onto when his own life devolved into chaos again and again. She was the reason he couldn’t stay in one place, because if he did he’d end up settling down with someone, and he didn’t have the stomach to have a family that would be put in danger by the nature of his existence.

There were none of the official procedures for military funerals. There were no soldiers or marines or sailors or airmen. There was no flag draped over the coffin. Because Ruby Nazarian didn’t exist — she’d never officially worked for the government in any capacity. She’d been a black-ops killer in a dark, secret world, much like King. Their achievements went unrecognised in the public eye, because if their efforts were revealed, the shadowy reality of the secret world would need to be revealed in turn.

If you fall asleep in the throes of a concussion, it can lead to irreversible brain damage. This concept had been hammered into Slater for his entire career, and he wasn’t about to forget it.