Stolen Car Quotes

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

Nothing Personal? You've harrassed my mother, stolen my car, and now you're telling people I've gotten you pregnant! In my opinion, getting someone pregnant is pretty fucking personal! Jesus, isn't it enough I'm accused of murder? What are you the bounty hunter from hell?

I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!

He put on his hat and wrapped his scarf around his jaw, but did without the wig and the sunglasses. He clicked his key chain and the car beeped and the doors locked. "That's it?" He looked up. "Sorry?" "Aren't you afraid it might get stolen? We're not exactly in a good part of town." "It's got a car alarm." "Don't you, like, cast a spell or something? To keep it safe?" "No. It's a pretty good car alarm.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment’s high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper who feels “real bad” about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows.

I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable, not again, not with this one. That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice – not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love – at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love – does not conquer all.

Right at that moment it was as if we were the only two people left in the world. And I don't mean that to sound corny; it just honestly did. The only sounds were the droning crickets and chip-chips of the bats, the farawy wind against the sand, and the occasional distant yowl of a dingo. There were no car horns.No trains. No jack-hammers. No lawnmowers No planes. No sirens. No alarms. No anything human. If you'd told me that you'd saved me from a nuclear holocaust, I might have believed you.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He had the two wards of the fucking Marshal of the fucking Southern Provinces in a stolen car. An entire continent away from where the two of them were supposed to be. In the Broken. Where they had beat up some Broken children. Well, if those children weren’t broken before, they were surely broken now. Fate, that broody, vicious, fickle bitch.

Hey," Victor said. "Tell me a story." Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: "There were these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends cheered and their parents' eyes shone with pride. You were very brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave." "Ya-hey," Victor said. "That's a good one. I wish I could be a warrior.

You call the police if your car gets stolen. You don’t call them for anything that matters.

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings. Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly — but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice over, your furnace will blow up, and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car. But what the hell? That's why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. But some things are forever, right? The structure may be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still strong and unshakable.

You were heading back toward me when I found you." "Toward...?" You nodded again. "So I figured the car had probably got stuck or died somehow, and you were just coming home." "Home?" "Yeah." Your mouth twitched. "Back to me.

When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn't go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.

No man can be stolen who doesn't consent to his own theft.

THE STOLEN CHILD Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward. It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity

One reason punishment doesn't usually work is that it does not coincide with the undesirable behavior; it occurs afterward, and sometimes, as in courts of law, long afterward. The subject therefore may not connect the punishment to his or her previous deeds; animals never do, and people often fail to. If a finger fell off every time someone stole something, or if cars burst into flames when they were parked illegally, I expect stolen property and parking tickets would be nearly nonexistent.

As much as $6 billion worth of power was pirated across America every year. Only cars and credit cards got stolen more.

Calling all cars, calling all cars. Be on the lookout for a stolen bank, approximately eleven feet tall, blue and white...

There’s something about driving a pretty girl somewhere potentially dangerous in a stolen car that just makes you feel good.

Although drinking to the point of becoming incapacitated is unwise and risky for anyone, the blame for rape must be put on the rapist who preys on a drunk woman, not a drunk woman who becomes prey. If my car is stolen after I’ve parked it with the door unlocked in a neighborhood known for car theft, a crime has been committed, and I have the right and expectation to report the crime to the police. No one would tell me that the thief is the one who deserves sympathy, and that apprehending him would ruin his life. No one would tell me I’m a terrible person for getting my car stolen, and that I deserve to have my car stolen. They would be right to question my judgment, but not the fact that a crime has been committed. But when it comes to rape, the victim’s pre-rape actions are used to justify the crime.

We’re loyal servants of the U.S. government. But Afghanistan involves fighting behind enemy lines. Never mind we were invited into a democratic country by its own government. Never mind there’s no shooting across the border in Pakistan, the illegality of the Taliban army, the Geneva Convention, yada, yada, yada. When we’re patrolling those mountains, trying everything we know to stop the Taliban regrouping, striving to find and arrest the top commanders and explosive experts, we are always surrounded by a well-armed, hostile enemy whose avowed intention is to kill us all. That’s behind enemy lines. Trust me. And we’ll go there. All day. Every day. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do, to the letter, or die in the attempt. On behalf of the U.S.A. But don’t tell us who we can attack. That ought to be up to us, the military. And if the liberal media and political community cannot accept that sometimes the wrong people get killed in war, then I can only suggest they first grow up and then serve a short stint up in the Hindu Kush. They probably would not survive. The truth is, any government that thinks war is somehow fair and subject to rules like a baseball game probably should not get into one. Because nothing’s fair in war, and occasionally the wrong people do get killed. It’s been happening for about a million years. Faced with the murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that’s the caliber and bullet gauge of our M4 rifle. And if those numbers don’t look good, try Article .762mm, that’s what the stolen Russian Kalashnikovs fire at us, usually in deadly, heavy volleys. In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, beheading, mutilation. Attacks on innocent civilians, women and children, car bombs, suicide bombers, anything the hell they can think of. They’re right up there with the monsters of history.

Have you really stolen a car?" "I have really stolen many cars before." "Could you steal my car?" "Your midrange car with no theft protection devices that you keep unlocked in your garage that is also unlocked?" Marcos snorted in disbelief. "Yes, I could steal it.

The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms, hoping to find it by luck. When that didn’t work, he became methodical, working in such a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out. He was in the back seat of his car, which was why he couldn’t find the steering wheel.

On the streets today gangs of Jews, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds around them, on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks. Many Jews killing themselves. All sorts of reports of Nazi sadism, and from the Austrians it surprises me. Jewish men and women made to clean latrines. Hundreds of them just picked at random off the streets to clean the toilets of the Nazi boys. The lucky ones get off with merely cleaning cars—the thousands of automobiles which have been stolen from the Jews

My thief,” Karson whispers as he kisses the back of her neck. “Will you ever stop calling me that?” she asks. “I stole one car.” So mouthy. As usual. “You’ve stolen more than that,” Karson says through a laugh. I cock my head at him. If he says some Hallmark shit like, “She stole my heart,” I will shoot him in it. Even if it’s kinda true.

One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study?

Listen,” you said. “To what? There’s nothing.” “There is. Maybe not shopping centers and cars, but other things … buzzing insects, racing ants, a slight wind making the tree creak, there’s a honeyeater up there, scuttling around, and the camels are coming.

[on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski.

He is unpacking his life in the back seat of this stolen car and her heart breaks.

You might think that the most stolen vehicles are expensive sports vehicles or multipurpose passenger vehicles, but that's not always the case

The last thing we need is a hot young sexpot turning heads our way. A hot young sexpot and her stolen car.

We must sober up and admit that too many of the Republicans and the Democrats have played us, lied to us and stolen from us, while the getaway car was driven by the media. A media that can no longer claim with a straight face the role of journalist. Journalists print the things the powerful don’t want printed. What they do is public relations. Those PR firms will not print the truth about the average American who finds himself concerned with the direction of our country today. So we must. We are not violent. We are not racist. We are not anti immigrant. We are not anti-government. And we will not be silent anymore.

Maybe John will come with me wherever it is I go, but whenever I picture the open highway, my only companion is a box of mix tapes. I decide to write a new story for Monday, one that looks to the future rather then the past, about a woman who starts a new life by making off with a stolen sports car, an Alfa Romeo spider convertible, and she drives west from Jersey to California, robbing banks and evading the law and breaking stereotypes and hearts.

How hard is it to keep an eye on one woman? I take six months. And you take six months. That was our agreement.”“Why is she still our responsibility?” “Because she’s our sister and we love her and if we don’t watch out for her, she will get involved with the wrong people , and destroy the world. Is that what you want?” “You always ask me that question, and you’re always disappointed with my answer.” Charlie sighed . “Well, we need to find her.” “I know.”“She’s in as much danger as we are.”“I know.” “They sent trained military after us.”“I know.” “And I know this car is stolen.”“Of course it’s stolen.

Hitler,” he had said, “is not a creator of national values. He’s a usurper. He has plundered the German nation’s industrial culture and zeal for work. He’s like an ignorant gangster who has stolen a magnificent car built by a brilliant scientist.

(Brett) “Never been to a football game either?” His voice lowered to a gravelly hush. “Well, like I said. We’ll make up for lost time.” He bent down and kissed her. “See you Friday?” Dazed, all she could contribute was, “Yeah, Friday…” before he turned and went back to his car. She walked inside, shut the door, leaned her back against it and concentrated on the rise and fall of her chest. It felt like he’d stolen her breath. And her heart. She was pretty sure he had taken a small piece of it with him.

And so now, under a Colorado sky so blue it hurt my eyes, we arrived at the terrible truth. You can plot your escape, you can ditch your life and your family, and you can race down a two-lane highway in a stolen car. But there are things you can never out run

I'm fine,' Oak says, sliding off the horse and immediately collapsing onto the asphalt. 'Fine?' the knight echoes, eyebrows raised. 'I couldn't say it if it wasn't true,' says the prince, and manages to stagger to his feet. He leans heavily on a nearby car.

You took me for a date at the zoo, said my love left something to prove, so I did all I knew to do, I stole a fat rhinoceros for you! Stolen rhino, in my car, Stolen rhino, now love me more Stolen rhino, I did it for you, Stolen rhino, don't make me steal two!

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

He felt the heat blasting from the vents of the Jeep and he gave a lot of grateful thought to the fact that he was finally in a comfortable enough place to fall asleep, not driving a stolen car and not sleeping in said stolen car in a copse of trees in twelve-degree weather; not in an unfamiliar bed that smelled like someone else; not in the series of try-hard cots in the Interim Room at Lathrop House but instead in the soft bucket seat of a Jeep that smelled like someone he knew; homeward bound, God what a queer thing to say but he hardly had the wherewithal to correct himself, so heavy were his eyelids, his head full of newfound knowledge, his belly full of egg rolls, and he didn’t even notice falling asleep; he just drifted off, Wendy to his left, because he knew, somehow, that she’d get them home.

Nothing personal? You’ve harassed my mother, stolen my car, and now you’re telling people I’ve gotten you pregnant! In my opinion, getting someone pregnant is pretty fucking personal! Jesus, isn’t it enough I’m accused of murder? What are you, the bounty hunter from hell?

But there was no denying Purvis’s ineptitude in the Dillinger hunt. Suspects were found then lost. His informants were hopeless. He raided the wrong apartments. He built no bridges to the Chicago police while annoying other departments. He’d had his car stolen from in front of his house.

All the various time travel devices used by Verne and Bert were stored in the repository, Poe explained, including the ones that had never quite worked as they were meant to. There was one that resembled a blue police box from London—“Stolen by a doctor with delusions of grandeur,” said Poe—one that was simply a large, transparent sphere—“Created by a scientist with green skin and too much ego,” said Verne—and one that was rather ordinary by comparison. “This one looks like an automobile,” John said admiringly, “with wings.” “The doors open that way for a reason,” Verne explained, “we just never figured out what it was. The inventor of this particular model tried integrating his designs into a car, an airplane, and even a steam engine train. He was running a crackpot laboratory in the Arizona desert, and he never realized that it was not his inventions themselves, but his proximity to some sort of temporal fluctuation in the local topography, that allowed them to work.” “What happened to him?” asked Jack. “He’d get the machines up to one hundred and six miles per hour,” said Bert, “and then he’d run out of fuel and promptly get arrested by whatever constabulary had been chasing him. The sad part was that Jules figured out if he’d just gone two miles an hour faster, he’d likely have been successful in his attempt.

deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers—this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too, there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders. (“You get paid five hundred bucks a trip,” or so Perry had read somewhere.) But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. “No fooling, Dick,” Perry said. “This is authentic. I’ve got a map. I’ve got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821—Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars—that’s what they

Stains tell a story,” Zac said, waving his arms as he spoke. “My car is full of random stains.

Orafoura once told me that if I were a car, I’d be a Ferrari. One that was scratched smashed, rusted, and stolen.

Our rental car was now encased in a brick of ice, waiting to be chipped free by future archaeologists.

Moira, who looked longingly at the police car they left behind. “I’ll come back for you, my love!” she said. “Don’t forget me, or our all-too-short time together. You’ll always be in my heart!

For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects.

It's amazing how people define roles for themselves and put handcuffs on their experience and are constantly surprised by the things a roulette universe spins at them. Here am I, they say, a mere wholesale fishmonger, at the controls of a giant airliner because as it turns out all the crew had the Coronation Chicken. Who'd have thought it? Here am I, a housewife who merely went out this morning to bank the proceeds of the Playgroup Association's Car Boot Sale, on the run with one million in stolen cash and a rather handsome man from the Battery Chickens' Liberation Organization. Amazing! Here am I, a perfectly ordinary hockey player, suddenly realizing I'm the Son of God with five hundred devoted followers in a nice little commune in Empowerment, Southern California. Who'd have thought it?

That one’s call had been so out of the blue. It was like being hit on the back of the head, waking up to find your purse gone, your car stolen. Things taken from you purely because someone else wanted them.

He placed himself hard against the left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out. He was in the back seat of his car, which was why he couldn’t find the steering wheel.

In one sense the cause of suicide is simple: overwhelming pain. This overwhelming pain, however, is the aggregate of thousands of pains. Any hurt that we have ever suffered, if it remains consciously or unconsciously lodged within us, can contribute to suicide. This may range from being an incest victim 50 years ago, to losing a job 10 years ago, to having a car battery stolen yesterday. The pains come from everywhere: ill-health, family, peers, school, work, community, caregivers. For each suicide there was a finite point at which this aggregate became too much. Although "The straw that broke the back," is frequently an accurate metaphor, no one pain is ever the cause of suicide. Suicidal pain is decomposable into thousands of pains, and nearly all of these pains are decomposable into painful constituents. Sexual abuse, job loss, and personal theft each have numerous painful constituents. The search for the single cause is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the understanding and prevention of suicide. It is inaccurate to say simply that pain causes suicide, since a level of pain that is lethal for one person may not be lethal for someone with greater resources. Similarly, deficiency in resources cannot be regarded as the cause of suicide, since two people may have equal resources and unequal pain. Our resources may also come from everywhere; even such trivial distractions as going to a movie can contribute to coping with suicidal pain.

He’s threatening us!” Tempest flailed. She slammed Wasp on the back so hard the communal eyeball popped right out of her socket. Wasp snatched it—and with a terrible show of fumbling, intentionally chucked it over her shoulder, right into my lap. I screamed. The sisters screamed, too. Anger, now bereft of guidance, swerved all over the road, sending my stomach into my esophagus. “He’s stolen our eye!” cried Tempest. “We can’t see!” “I have not!” I yelped. “It’s disgusting!” Meg whooped with pleasure. “THIS. IS. SO. COOL!” “Get it off!” I squirmed and tilted my hips, hoping the eye would roll away, but it stayed stubbornly in my lap, staring up at me with the accusatory glare of a dead catfish. Meg did not help. Clearly, she didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the coolness of us dying in a faster-than-light car crash. “He will crush our eye,” Anger cried, “if we don’t recite our verses!” “I will not!” “We will all die!” Wasp said. “He is crazy!” “I AM NOT!” “Fine, you win!” Tempest howled. She drew herself up and recited as if performing for the people in Connecticut ten miles away: “A dare reveals the path that was unknown!” Anger chimed in: “And bears destruction; lion, snake-entwined!” Wasp concluded: “Or else the princeps never be o’erthrown!” Meg clapped. I stared at the Gray Sisters in disbelief. “That wasn’t doggerel. That was terza rima! You just gave us the next stanza of our actual prophecy!” “Well, that’s all we’ve got for you!” Anger said. “Now give me the eye, quick. We’re almost at camp!” Panic overcame my shock. If Anger couldn’t stop at our destination, we’d accelerate past the point of no return and vaporize in a colorful streak of plasma across Long Island. And yet that still sounded better than touching the eyeball in my lap. “Meg! Kleenex?” She snorted. “Wimp.” She scooped up the eye with her bare hand and tossed it to Anger. Anger shoved the eye in her socket. She blinked at the road, yelled “YIKES!” and slammed on the brakes so hard my chin hit my sternum.

Wren was discovered in the flashing lights of a patrol car two years later, walking along the side of a highway. The soles of her shoes were as worn as if she'd danced through them, her clothing was stiff with sea salt, and scars marred the skin of her wrists and cheeks.

If you put shampoo into a car engine, you're not going to scratch your head when the thing conks out,' [Dale Pinnock] said. Yet every day, all over the Western world, we are putting into our bodies substances 'which are so far removed from what was intended for human fuel.

Four hours later Liv wakes in a box room with an Arsenal duet cover and a head that thumps so hard she has to reach up a hand to check she isn't being assaulted. She blinks, stares blearily at the little Japanese cartoon creatures on the wall opposite and lets her mind slowly bring together the pieces of information from the previous night. Stolen bag...she closes her eyes. Oh, no. Strange bed...she has no keys. Oh, God she has no keys. And no money. She attempts to move, and pain slices through her head so that she almost yelps. And then she remembers the man. Pete? Paul? She sees herself walking through deserted streets in the early hours. And then she sees herself lurching forward to kiss him, his own polite retreat. "You are delicious..." "Oh, no," she says softly, then puts her hands over her eyes. "Oh, I didn't..." She sits up and moves to the side of the bed, noticing a small yellow plastic car near his right foot. Then, when she hears the sound of a door opening, the shower starting up next door, Liv grabs her shoes and her jacket and lets herself out of the flat into the cacophonous daylight.

Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready…. Life is fired at us point-blank.” If you don’t do this now, I told myself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be lying on your deathbed seeing how many likes you got on Instagram. I climbed into the car and refused to look back.

I’ll have one of my men drop a car off for you.” “Thanks. I’ll try not to lose it.” “If you can manage to keep it intact for a week, it’s yours. If it gets stolen, blown up, crushed by a garbage truck, set on fire, filled with cement, or dies an untimely death by any other means, I’ll expect you to spend the night with me.

In Minneapolis, tires were slashed and windows smashed. A high school student getting off a bus was hit in the face and told to “go back to China.” A woman was kicked in the thighs, face, and kidneys, and her purse, which contained the family’s entire savings of $400, was stolen; afterwards, she forbade her children to play outdoors, and her husband, who had once commanded a fifty-man unit in the Armée Clandestine, stayed home to guard the family’s belongings. In Providence, children walking home from school were beaten. In Missoula, teenagers were stoned. In Milwaukee, garden plots were vandalized and a car was set on fire. In Eureka, California, two burning crosses were placed on a family’s front lawn. In a random act of violence near Springfield, Illinois, a twelve-year-old boy was shot and killed by three men who forced his family’s car off Interstate 55 and demanded money. His father told a reporter, “In a war, you know who your enemies are. Here, you don’t know if the person walking up to you will hurt you.

As the car disappeared down the road, old Granny Frinda lay crumpled on the red dirt calling for her granddaughters and cursing the people responsible for their abduction. In their grief the women asked why their children should be taken from them. Their anguished cries echoed across the flats, carried by the wind. But no one listened to them, no one heard them.

President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.

He was conscious of a bliss that stole over him not infrequently now, had first stolen over him when he had first acquired this car, first bent over the bat-wing hood and seen the engine and drive-train, humble and useful like his own internal organs. It was a sense that at last what he knew of the world was sufficient to his being alive in it: that the world and what he knew of it were one. He called this feeling "growing up," and it did feel like growing, though in moments of mad elation he would wonder if what he was growing into weren't a Ford, or perhaps Ford: there was no other instrument, and no other man, so serenely purposeful and complete, August thought, so sufficient to the world and so self-sufficient: it would have been a destiny he could welcome.

Don't get killed. Don't get robbed. Don't get billed for jobs that were abandoned. Don't let your house burn or your pipes burst or your children curse. Don't let your purse get stolen. Don't get trapped underwater. Don't get food poisoning or the flu. For God's sake get vaccinated. Don't get cancer. Seriously. Do. Not. Get. Cancer. Don't get t-boned by a drunk. Don't get struck by lightning. Don't get allergies. Don't get depressed. Don't get noticed by the IRS. Don't get catfished or gaslit. Don't get ghosted by an ex. Don't get talked into a bigger car. Don't get bit by a rabid dog. Don't get your boo angry. Don't get cheated on. Don't get called out, dragged, tagged in pics you don't remember. Don't get raped cause the jack asses and idiots will say that's your fault, too.

It’s quiet in the suburbs. It’s too cold for people to be in their gardens; and it’s not a thoroughfare so few cars drive by. I look past decaying roses and through the first flush of Michelmas daisies, blazing a glorious purple, into the darkened windows of the houses we walk by. Who lives here? Are they watching us? Did one of our neighbours do something seven years ago that he now regrets? How little we know of the people who surround us.

She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth. And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do.

Very important words!” Wasp said. “But you’ll never hear them!” “Okay,” I agreed. “You can’t make us!” Tempest said. “Even though your fate depends on it!” A hint of doubt crept into my cranium. Was it possible—? No, surely not. If I fell for their tricks, I’d most likely get the Gray Sisters’ hot take on which facial products were perfect for my skin undertones. “Not buying it,” I said. “Not selling!” Wasp shrieked. “Too important, these lines! We would only tell you if you threatened us with terrible things!” “I will not resort to threatening you—” “He’s threatening us!” Tempest flailed. She slammed Wasp on the back so hard the communal eyeball popped right out of her socket. Wasp snatched it—and with a terrible show of fumbling, intentionally chucked it over her shoulder, right into my lap. I screamed. The sisters screamed, too. Anger, now bereft of guidance, swerved all over the road, sending my stomach into my esophagus. “He’s stolen our eye!” cried Tempest. “We can’t see!” “I have not!” I yelped. “It’s disgusting!” Meg whooped with pleasure. “THIS. IS. SO. COOL!” “Get it off!” I squirmed and tilted my hips, hoping the eye would roll away, but it stayed stubbornly in my lap, staring up at me with the accusatory glare of a dead catfish. Meg did not help. Clearly, she didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the coolness of us dying in a faster-than-light car crash. “He will crush our eye,” Anger cried, “if we don’t recite our verses!” “I will not!” “We will all die!” Wasp said. “He is crazy!” “I AM NOT!” “Fine, you win!” Tempest howled. She drew herself up and recited as if performing for the people in Connecticut ten miles away: “A dare reveals the path that was unknown!” Anger chimed in: “And bears destruction; lion, snake-entwined!” Wasp concluded: “Or else the princeps never be o’erthrown!” Meg clapped. I stared at the Gray Sisters in disbelief. “That wasn’t doggerel. That was terza rima! You just gave us the next stanza of our actual prophecy!

I accumulate rash acts: getting into stolen cars, walking in front of stores where I have operated, showing obviously fake papers. I have the feeling that in a very short time everything is bound to break wide open. My rash acts are serious matters and I know that airy-winged catastrophe will emerge from a very, very slight mistake. 1 But while I hope for misfortune as an act of grace, it is well for me to plunge fully into the usual ways of the world. I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve, slightly bent toward evening, but a hitherto unseen beauty, lovely because of the danger which works away at it, overwhelms it, undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty! I shall go quickly or slowly, but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances, the casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand, quiet and pure, like a glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

You might say, “I know I am an immortal spirit,” or “I am tired of this mad world, and peace is all I want”—until the phone rings. Bad news: The stock market has collapsed; the deal may fall through; the car has been stolen; your mother-in-law has arrived; the trip is cancelled, the contract has been broken; your partner has left you; they demand more money; they say it’s your fault. Suddenly there is a surge of anger, of anxiety. A harshness comes into your voice; “I can’t take any more of this.” You accuse and blame, attack, defend, or justify yourself, and it’s all happening on autopilot. Something is obviously much more important to you now than the inner peace that a moment ago you said was all you wanted, and you’re not an immortal spirit anymore either. The deal, the money, the contract, the loss or threat of loss are more important. To whom? To the immortal spirit that you said you are? No, to me. The small me that seeks security or fulfillment in things that are transient and gets anxious or angry because it fails to find it. Well, at least now you know who you really think you are.

But that California trip was just a flash in the eye of that year. The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don’t really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2’s Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? The officer actually drew a gun. I was terrified. The worst part of all was that when I saw the police in the rearview mirror, I started thinking that maybe I had stolen the car. I don’t know what the psychological phenomenon is called, exactly, but when you encircle someone with suspicion, the idea of guilt just starts to appear within them. It was a terrible feeling and it’s a terrible process, and it was another reminder that the life I was leading, while superficially uneventful, had the potential to turn against me at any moment.

The very first dram Ronan had ever been truly proud of, truly euphoric over, had been a copy. It had been in high school. Ronan wasn't good at surviving high school and he wasn't good at surviving friendship, and so while his friend Gansey's back was turned, he'd stolen Gansey's car. It was a beautiful car. A 1973 bright orange Camaro with stripes right up its hood and straight down its ass. Ronan had wanted to drive it for months, despite Gansey forbidding it. Maybe because of him forbidding it. Within hours of stealing it, Ronan had totaled it. Gansey hadn't wanted him to drive it because he thought he'd grind the clutch, or curb it, or burn out the tires, or maybe, maybe blow the engine. And here Ronan had totaled it. Ronan had loved Richard C. Gansey III far more than he loved himself at that point, and he hadn't known how he was ever going to face him when he returned from out of town. And then, Joseph Kavinsky had taught him to dream a copy. Before that, all of Ronan's dreams--that he knew about, Matthew didn't count--had been accidents and knickknacks, the bizarre and the useless. When he'd successfully copied a car, an entire car, he'd been out of his mind with glee. The dreamt car had been perfect down to the last detail. Exactly like the original. The pinnacle of dreaming. Now a copy was the least impressive thing to him. He could copy anything he put his mind to. That just made him a very ethereal photocopier. A one-man 3-D printer. The dreams he was proud of now were the dreams that were originals. Dreams that couldn't exist in any other way. Dreams that took full advantage of the impossibility of dreamspace in a way that was cunning or lovely or effective or all of the above. The sundogs. Lindenmere. Dreams that had to be dreams. In the past, all his good dreams like this were gifts from Lindenmere or accidents rather than things he had consciously constructed. He was beginning to realize, after listening to Bryde, that this was because he'd been thinking too small. His consciousness was slowly becoming the shape of the concrete, waking world, and it was shrinking all his dreams to the probable. He needed to start realizing that possible and impossible didn't mean the same thing for him as they did for other people. He needed to break himself of the habit of rules, of doubts, of physics. His "what if" had grown so tame. "You are made of dreams and this world is not for you." He would not let the nightwash take him and Matthew. He would not let this world kill him slowly. He deserved a place here, too. He woke.

Simi Chopra, will you marry me?" He opened the blue velvet box in his hand and showed me a beautiful sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds. My mouth opened, but all that spilled out was, "My brain..." A frown creased Jack's brow. "Not really the answer I was expecting." "I can't..." I shook my head. "You organized all this? Chloe? The dress? The car? Trey and all the renovations were real? When did you buy this house? It had to be after I told you I wanted to take a break." "Yes, it was." "But how did you know we'd get back together?" "Because if we weren't meant to be together, I would never have been in the bushes the night you tried to save Chloe in the museum. I wouldn't have held you in my arms and known deep in my bones that I'd met the woman I'd been waiting for all my life... a woman who is intelligent and beautiful and brave and loyal, who has a secret love of adventure and a wicked sense of humor, a woman who lights up every room she walks into and can take a group of misfits and turn them into a family. A woman I want to call my wife." He took the ring out of the box and slid it on my finger. "This was my mother's ring. It is the only thing I have left to remember her by, and there is no one else I have ever wanted to give it to but you." I looked at the ring and then at the man who had stolen my heart. "Yes, Jack, I'll marry you.

The gate downstairs has a dead bolt,” said Frost. “There’s no way you could pick the lock.” “Then how could anyone …” She went dead silent. Turned toward the doorway. Footsteps were thumping up the stairs. In an instant her weapon was drawn and clutched in both hands. Pushing aside Mr. Kwan, she quickly slipped out of the bedroom. As she eased her way across the living room, she felt her heart banging, heard Frost’s footsteps creaking on her right. Smelled incense and mold and sweat, a dozen details assaulting her at once. But it was the stairwell door she focused on, a black portal to something that was now climbing toward them. Something that suddenly took on the shape of a man. “Freeze!” Frost commanded. “Boston PD!” “Whoa, Frost.” Johnny Tam gave a startled laugh. “It’s just me.” Behind her, Jane heard Mr. Kwan give a squawk of fear. “Who is he? Who is he?” “What the hell, Tam,” said Frost, huffing out a breath as he holstered his weapon. “I could have blown your head off.” “You did tell me to meet you here, didn’t you? I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got stuck in traffic coming back from Springfield.” “You talk to the owner of that Honda?” “Yeah. Said it was stolen right out of his driveway. And that wasn’t his GPS in the car.” He swept his flashlight around the room. “So what’s going on in here?” “Mr. Kwan’s giving us a tour of the building.” “It’s been boarded up for years.

He would have known or found out that the sewer-pipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant, too. Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it. At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform—that was a day later. The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewer-pipe and he disappeared like smoke. But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.

Jim said she would go to prison for sure because of the amount she had stolen, and there was probably more. “I can bring over dinner if you want.” “I’m just going to pack and go to bed. I hate that early flight,” Tallie said, smiling back at her. And every time she did now, it felt false. She was used to getting up early to be on the set, so even that was a lie. Everything was now. Everything Tallie said to her felt wrong, and everything Brigitte had done had been worse. Brigitte gave her a hug as they left each other, and Tallie hugged her back, feeling her insides cringe when she did. “Give Max my love.” “Have fun in Mexico!” Tallie called out as she left. Brigitte had said she was going to Palmilla, but she hadn’t said with whom, and Tallie didn’t care. It made Tallie wonder, as she walked to her car, when and how she was going to fire her. She called Greg Thomas from the car. She wanted to discuss it with him, and she told him everything that had been happening, and that the FBI were going to make the arrest in the next week. “I’ve been waiting to fire her until they told me I could. The special agent in charge of the case called me today and told me. He’s coming by tonight. So what do I do about her?” “I’d like to notify her by letter and e-mail,” Greg said quietly. “I don’t want you doing it face-to-face. This could get nasty, or even dangerous for you. Do you think she could get violent?” He was worried about Tallie, especially since she was alone at the house now that Hunt was gone. “I don’t think so. I hope not.” Tallie hadn’t really thought about it. They had been so busy getting evidence

I was 18 wen I started driving I was 18 the first time I was pulled over. It was 2 AM on a Saturday The officer spilled his lights all over my rearview mirror, he splashed out of the car with his hand already on his weapon, and looked at me the way a tsunami looks at a beach house. Immediately, I could tell he was the kind of man who brings a gun to a food fight. He called me son and I thought to myself, that's an interesting way of pronouncing "boy," He asks for my license and registration, wants to know what I'm doing in this nieghborhood, if the car is stolen, if I have any drugs and most days, I know how to grab my voice by the handle and swing it like a hammer. But instead, I picked it up like a shard of glass. Scared of what might happen if I didn't hold it carefully because I know that this much melanin and that uniform is a plotline to a film that can easily end with a chalk outline baptism, me trying to make a body bag look stylish for the camera and becoming the newest coat in a closet full of RIP hashtags. Once, a friend of a friend asked me why there aren't more black people in the X Games and I said, "You don't get it." Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades. Jim Crow may have left the nest, but our streets are still covered with its feathers. Being black in America is knowing there's a thin line between a traffic stop and the cemetery, it's the way my body tenses up when I hear a police siren in a song, it's the quiver in my stomach when a cop car is behind me, it's the sigh of relief when I turn right and he doesn't. I don't need to go volcano surfing. Hell, I have an adrenaline rush every time an officer drives right past without pulling me over and I realize I'm going to make it home safe. This time.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

…After seventeen minutes of panicky crowds destroying everything in their path, Eric could distinguish, despite all the chaos and hellish noise, the slight buzz of a second plane. He started counting to himself, watching the blazing inferno at the North Tower: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… The second Boeing glided into the South Tower, WTC-2, and it seemed to Eric that this plane was flying slowly, that its impact was a soft one… Due to the pandemonium all around, the impact itself seemed not to be as loud as the first hit. Still, in a moment the second twin was also blazing. Both skyscrapers were on fire now. Novack looked up again at what had happened a minute before: the terror attack of the century. Then he started walking fast down Church Street, away from the huge buildings that were now on fire. He knew that in about an hour, the South Tower was to collapse completely, and half an hour after that, the same was to happen to the North Tower, which was also weakened by the impact. He knew there were tons of powerful Thermate in both buildings. Over the course of the previous two months, some fake repairmen had brought loads of it into the towers and put them in designated places around the trusswork. It was meant to make buildings collapse like card towers, which would only happen when the flames reached a certain point. The planes had started an unstoppable countdown as soon as they hit the buildings: these were the last minutes of their existence. Next in line was the third building: 7 WTC, which stood north of the Twin Towers. It counted forty-seven floors, and it too was stuffed with Thermate. Novack started getting concerned, however, that the third plane seemed to be late. Where’s the third plane? Why is it late? It’s already fifty minutes after the first impact, and they were supposed to hit the three targets with a time lag of about twenty minutes. Where are you, birdie number three? You are no less important than the first two, and you were also promised to my clients… People were still running in all directions, shouting and bumping into each other. Sirens wailed loudly, heartrendingly; ambulances were rushing around, giving way only to firefighters and emergency rescue teams. Suddenly hundreds of policemen appeared on the streets, but it seemed that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do. They mostly ran around, yelling into their walkie-talkies. At Thomas Street, Eric walked into a parking lot: the gate arm was up and the security guy must have left, for the door of his booth stood wide open… …Two shots rang out simultaneously during the fifth and the longest second. They were executed synchronously, creating a single, stinging, deadly sound. The bullet from the sixth floor of the book depository went straight up into the sky, as planned. The second bullet shot out of a sniper rifle, held confidently in the arms of a woman behind the hedge, on the grassy knoll. It was her bullet that struck the head of the 35th US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The woman walked quickly down the grassy knoll. Stepping only about five meters away, she put her rifle into a baby pram waiting there, with a real six-month-old baby boy whimpering inside it. She put on thick glasses and started walking away, exhibiting no haste. Only thirty seconds after the second shot, the woman was gone, nowhere to be seen… After the second or, rather, the third shot, the one from the knoll, President Kennedy’s head was tossed back. Jackie somehow managed to crawl onto the back hood of the car. A security agent from the escort car had already reached them. The motorcade picked up speed and disappeared under the overpass. Zapruder’s camera kept whirring for some seconds. He must have filmed the whole operation – that is, the assassination of an acting US president. But now he simply stood there without saying a word, completely dumbfounded...

A sign alerted that we had better remove anything valuable from the car because it would be stolen. Not "might." Would. Did the beach keep thieves on staff to assure the sign wasn't a lie?

I’m not married. I have no family of my own. I drive people to airports for a living. And I live with my dog. That’s it. That’s all I have. That’s my life. So whoever took Oliver, they didn’t just take my cell phone or car or computer. They took my whole life. You’re looking at a broken man, And that’s why I’m here. I have love in my heart, and I need your help.

His . . . fictional Owen’s mother should be down at the police station by now, but who knew when she’d be back. For all he knew, there’d be police cars on their way to the house, too.

Charlestown’s most characteristic pastime had long been the reckless sport of “looping.” The young “looper” played by a rigid set of rules. First, he stole a car in downtown Boston. Then he roared into Charlestown, accelerating as he reached City Square, where the District 15 police station stood in a welter of bars, nightclubs, and pool halls. Often he had to take a turn around the square before the first policeman dashed for his patrol car or motorcycle. Then the chase was on: down Chelsea Street to Hayes Square, up the long slope of Bunker Hill Street to St. Francis de Sales’ Church at the crest, then down again, picking up speed, often to 70 or 80 miles per hour, until a screeching left into Sullivan Square took him onto Main Street, where, dodging the stanchions of the El, he roared into City Square again, completing the “loop.” All that remained was to ditch the car before the police caught up. Looping was an initiation rite, proof that a Townie had come of age. But it was something else as well: a challenge flung at authority, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. Before long, looping became a kind of civic spectacle, pitting the Town’s young heroes against the forces of law and order. Plans for a loop circulated well in advance. At the appointed hour, hundreds of men, women, and children gathered along Bunker Hill Street, awaiting the gladiators. When the stolen car came in sight, racing up the long hill, a cheer would rise from the spectators, followed by jeers for the pursuing policemen. The first recorded “loop” was performed in 1925 by a sixteen-year-old daredevil named Jimmy “Speed King” Murphy, but most renowned of all was “Shiner” Sheehan, the teenage son of a federal alcohol agent, whose exploits so electrified the Town that he drew round him a group of young acolytes. Membership in their “Speeders Club” was limited to those who could produce newspaper clippings showing they had bested the police.

Of course, the real reason for the difficulty is that the raw materials that were created for the use and benefit of all have been stolen by a small number, who refuse to allow them to be used for the purposes for which they were intended. This numerically insignificant minority refuse to allow the majority to work and produce the things they need; and what work they do graciously permit to be done is not done with the object of producing the necessaries of life for those who work, but for the purpose of creating profit for their masters. And then, strangest fact of all, the people who find it a hard struggle to live, or who exist in dreadful poverty and sometimes starve, instead of trying to understand the causes of their misery and to find out a remedy themselves, spend all their time applauding the Practical, Sensible, Level-headed Business-men, who bungle and mismanage their affairs, and pay them huge salaries for doing so. Sir Graball D’Encloseland, for instance, was a ‘Secretary of State’ and was paid £5,000 a year. When he first got the job the wages were only a beggarly £2,000, but as he found it impossible to exist on less than £100 a week he decided to raise his salary to that amount; and the foolish people who find it a hard struggle to live paid it willingly, and when they saw the beautiful motor car and the lovely clothes and jewellery he purchased for his wife with the money, and heard the Great Speech he made – telling them how the shortage of everything was caused by Over-production and Foreign Competition, they clapped their hands and went frantic with admiration. Their only regret was that there were no horses attached to the motor car, because if there had been, they could have taken them out and harnessed themselves to it instead.

I was thirteen the first time I ever got arrested and can remember it as though it were yesterday. I was driving a stolen Ford Escort MK 2, my feet barely able to touch the pedals, yet I’d still been able to handle that car like a man. Cigarettes, I’d been caught with. Illegal ones that’d been brought into the country from Belgium via France. Yet no matter how hard the Old Bill interrogated me, I never admitted to where I’d really got those fags from. ‘One of life’s losers, that’s what you are. You’ll never amount to nothing, you stupid

The drive back to the Chicken Hut, while uneventful, was probably the most intense six or seven minutes in Chaz’s life. He’d watched a vampire murder his girlfriend, but that didn’t even compare with driving around in a stolen cop car with two hostages and a gnome.

Xavier and Catalina sat in the VIP box, waving down at us enthusiastically and I waved back before giving Darius my full attention. The entire right side of his face was covered in mud, not to mention the rest of him and his torn jersey fell open to reveal the firm cut of his abs and that perfect V which dipped beneath his waistband. “You’re killing it out there,” I told him truthfully, flashing a sweet smile which instantly had him narrowing his eyes in suspicion. We hadn’t exactly talked much since the whole three way thing and I was really curious about how he was feeling about that. But I was even more curious as to how he was going to react when he realised I’d been playing with the sack of treasure I stole from him oh so long ago. There were plenty of times when I’d thought about the little stash we’d hidden out in the woods and wondered why he hadn’t asked for it back and there was only one reason that made any sense – he assumed I didn’t have it anymore. I didn’t know if he thought I’d sold it or destroyed it, but I was about to remind him that I still had it and see how nice he was when his temper flared. I was pretty sure there was a guide book or two out there about not poking a Dragon, but I guessed I was just too stupid to care. “Thanks. Are you looking for me to make some cheesy statement like I’m thinking of you every time I tackle someone?” he teased and I laughed, tossing my hair. He frowned at me and I had to admit that might have been overkill, but whatever. “Nice to know I’m on your mind every time you have someone pinned beneath you in the mud,” I purred. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Mildred rising to her feet in the stands with a face like an angry Koala which had been hit by a car. I didn’t have long before she came over here to stake her claim on her Dragon, but I didn’t need much time. “I think I’ve made my desire to pin you beneath me pretty clear,” Darius replied in a low voice which had my toes curling, but I wasn’t here to flirt, I was here to poke a Dragon. “Good luck for the second half,” I said in a sweet voice, reaching out touch his bicep, making sure that the gold rings pressed against his skin. Darius looked down the moment he felt his magic stir in response to the gold and his eyes widened in surprise which was quickly followed by a flash of fury as he recognised the jewellery from his stash which I’d stolen. I whirled away from him with a dark laugh before he could do any more than suck in an angry breath and I jogged out to join my squad just as they started up a chant. V – E – G – A! She’ll wipe the floor with you today! Veeeeega! Veeeeega! I fell into the moves of the chant, clapping my hands as some of the others rustled pom-poms and Darcy offered me an appreciative smile from the side of the pitch. We had little chants like that for all of the team members, but we often forgot to call out for the Heirs. The music suddenly dropped and 7 Rings by Ariana Grande burst from speakers around the stadium as we moved into a full routine filled with dance moves and tricks. The song choice turned out to be perfect for taunting a gold obsessed Dragon as well as performing a badass routine to and I couldn’t help but smirk like a psychopath throughout. Darius stood glaring at me from the side of the pitch even when Seth tried to drag him into the locker rooms and my heart thundered at the pure fury in his eyes. Remind me again why I thought poking the Dragon was a good idea because he looks ready to shit a brick! I turned my eyes from him, grinning out at the crowd as I moved between my girls, running forward as I performed a set of hand springs which ended in me throwing a huge blast of multicoloured petals up into the air so that they fell over the crowd. (Tory)

It goes without saying that this method of communal parking duties would be an impossibility in a country where stealing was common. If they tried this in South Africa, for example, everyone’s car would be stolen every day and it would end up as some sort of car roulette. Everyone would have a different car every day. In Libya, stealing is punishable by death, or something nearly as extreme, like leg removal. (I had better Google that.)

On one such occasion, I heard a noise downstairs and went to investigate. I found Faye opening cabinets, taking things out of the refrigerator, and searching for her car keys. We chatted a bit about how she was late for work and how she hated her manager. To the uninitiated, Faye might have seemed totally cognizant of her actions. If not for the fact that she was completely nude and trying to heat up a couch pillow for breakfast in total darkness, even I might have been fooled.

If we are all good people with good hearts and intensions. If we are all disciplined. We all respect and obey the law and authority. Genuinely love and care for each other. Wishing well and the best for each other. See each other as one big family than strangers. Then we are ready for one Africa, and we can do away with the borders, But if not. What will open borders do is to allow worse and evil things to happen to good people in a bigger scale. It will be easy to start a war. People won’t be reliable. The society and the system keeping things in place will fail. More crimes and treason will be committed. It will be hard close to impossible to catch criminals and to sentence them. Criminals will have bigger market to steal and to commit their crimes. It will be easily for them to move around, to do money, diamond, gold laundering . Easy to smuggle people, stolen items, drugs, cars, cigarette. Fugitives, murders and rapist, pedophiles, serial killers. Opportunists , scammers or con man or women. Will fool and take advantage of lot of people. It will be easy for them to start cult and to manipulate people. Corporates will get more cheap labor employes that they will enslaves and to extort. Open borders is good business for criminals not for loyal honest citizens. Ask yourself. How many things illegal things were caught at the border or customs ? How many criminals and dangerous people were caught at the border or customs? Ask yourself what would have happen If there were no borders ? Open borders would have been a good idea if we were all good people and your unfortunately, we are not. We all have hidden agendas and will say and do anything for money.

…Two shots rang out simultaneously during the fifth and the longest second. They were executed synchronously, creating a single, stinging, deadly sound. The bullet from the sixth floor of the book depository went straight up into the sky, as planned. The second bullet shot out of a sniper rifle, held confidently in the arms of a woman behind the hedge, on the grassy knoll. It was her bullet that struck the head of the 35th US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The woman walked quickly down the grassy knoll. Stepping only about five meters away, she put her rifle into a baby pram waiting there, with a real six-month-old baby boy whimpering inside it. She put on thick glasses and started walking away, exhibiting no haste. Only thirty seconds after the second shot, the woman was gone, nowhere to be seen… After the second or, rather, the third shot, the one from the knoll, President Kennedy’s head was tossed back. Jackie somehow managed to crawl onto the back hood of the car. A security agent from the escort car had already reached them. The motorcade picked up speed and disappeared under the overpass. Zapruder’s camera kept whirring for some seconds. He must have filmed the whole operation – that is, the assassination of an acting US president. But now he simply stood there without saying a word, completely dumbfounded..

For the anthology Homewrecker, in which A had a story years before becoming an Adulteress herself, the editor, Daphne Gottlieb, wrote: “I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable . . . That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice—not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love—at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love—does not conquer all.

Richard said he wouldn’t talk about anything but the convictions. Carrillo asked if it would be all right if they taped what he said. He said no. They then began asking him about the crimes and how he did them. Richard gave them, the detectives later said—which Richard vehemently denies—the details of how he worked, lived, and avoided capture for so long. The detectives say he told them he capered in stolen cars, which he sometimes left in the parking lot of the Greyhound Bus Terminal. He always stashed any weapon he had in the terminal lockers until he realized the car might be staked out. At that point he began driving the cars around the block a few times before he retrieved his weapons. According to the detectives, they began talking about the actual murders, beginning with Vincow. Richard told them what he knew. They weren’t sure if he was bragging and making things up, but he seemed sincere, they thought. For the next week, as Richard ate sweets, he told the two detectives the details of what he said had taken place. Both detectives enjoyed talking to him. “He had a likable side to him that was easy to warm to,” Carrillo later said. Their meetings were brought to a halt on November 16, when Richard was taken to San Quentin. The last time Salerno and Carrillo saw him, he asked them if they were going to come to his execution. Carrillo said he wasn’t sure... didn’t think so. “You bet I’m coming,” Salerno said, dead serious, looking Richard right in the eye.

He pictures, ludicrously, a high-speed chase through the desert: he and Rio and Whale speeding towards the Polaris camp, with Juno in his probably stolen Fauxcedes barreling after them. Whale barks out the window as they leap over hillocks and take a hard turn into the scrub, howling a devil-may-care, Fuck you!

Their high achiever was Jacob. Arrested for stealing a car, he'd arrived at his magistrate's hearing in a car he'd stolen to get himself there.

She’s only nineteen. She can’t buy a beer or rent a car. She can barely vote!

She stepped out of the car, shutting the door behind her. And somehow, I had a distinct feeling that one day, the door would shut between us permanently.