The Wire Episode Quotes

Episodic memories get stored in the hippocampus as our stories—our interpretation of events with our emotional responses attached to them. These are memories that are tied to serious emotional reactions. If something happened in your life that was really significant to you, the emotions tied to that memory become attached like cat hair or static cling. So when we have an emotional response in the future, the amygdala immediately pulls this EAM file in order to decide how to respond. What fires together, wires together.

Not only these were new kinds of stories, they were being told with a new kind of formal structure. [...] The result was a storytelling architecture you could picture as a colonnade - each episode a brick with its own solid, satisfying shape, but also part of a season-long arc that, in turn, would stand linked to other seasons to form a coherent, freestanding work of art. [...] The new structure allowed huge creative freedom: to develop characters over long stretches of time, to tell stories over the course of fifty hours or more, the equivalent of countless movies.

The cardinal directions are north, west, south, and east. The cardinal temperatures are 35º Fahrenheit, 67º Fahrenheit, 3º Celsius, and 10º Kelvin. The cardinal locations are a cave, a long-abandoned cabin, the bottom of an oceanic trench, and City Hall. The cardinal emotions are wild abandon, guarded affection, directionless jealousy, and irritation. The cardinal birds are hawk, sparrow, finch, and owl. The cardinal names are Jeremy, Kim, Trigger, and Jamie. And, finally, the cardinal sounds are a door slamming, slight movement in still water, popcorn popping, and a standard guitar G string being snipped with wire cutters. This has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

show from the last 20 years, look out for a detective by the name of John Munch. Always played by the same man, Richard Belzer, he was originally a character on Homicide: Life on the Street, before joining the cast of Law & Order Special Victims Unit. But there’s more; he has also been seen on episodes of The X-Files, Arrested Development, The Wire, 30 Rock and many more - always the same actor as the same character. Weird, but amazing nonetheless.

Primer of Love [Lesson 7] "He disrespected the Bing." ~ Tony Soprano, Episode 34 Lesson 7)Don't diss'em or let'em diss you. We're back on Brooklyn's streets (or Newark) on this one. It's all about respect - show none and you get whacked. None of that 'alpha' shit flies here - you're equals and command equal respect. She watches the kids, you cart the garbage. The kids wear her down all day; the cops break your chops about a missing WalMart tractor trailer with 100,000 pair of Levi jeans 'somebody' jacked on the Jersey Turnpike. You twos gotta' to vent your daily shit to each other.Let it all out, but be careful not to anything you may regret or prepare to sleep with a Glock under your pillow for the rest of your live. Insist you be totally naked when having sex to make sure nobody's wearing a wire. Capisce!

Intention is a subtle concept. The immediate intention is not to get rid of pain—it is to focus the mind, in order to change the brain. Thinking that the immediate reward will be pain reduction will make it hard to get there, because that reward comes slowly. In the early stages what counts is the mental effort to change. These mental efforts help build new circuits and weaken the pain networks. The initial reward, after an episode, is being able to say, “I got a pain attack and used it as an opportunity to exercise mental effort and develop new connections in my brain, which will help in the long run,” rather than “I got a pain attack, I tried to get rid of it, but am still in pain.” Moskowitz writes, in his patient handout: “If focus is merely on immediate pain control, positive results will be fleeting and frustrating. Immediate pain control is definitely part of the program, but the real reward is to disconnect excessively wired pain networks and to restore more balanced brain function in these pain processing regions of the brain.

If you’re watching a popular American show from the last 20 years, look out for a detective by the name of John Munch. Always played by the same man, Richard Belzer, he was originally a character on Homicide: Life on the Street, before joining the cast of Law & Order Special Victims Unit. But there’s more; he has also been seen on episodes of The X-Files, Arrested Development, The Wire, 30 Rock and many more - always the same actor as the same character.

Quinn and Leslie repeatedly showed themselves to be experts at build-a-gag in which related elements were parlayed together for comic effect, and in this episode they play the numbers game as Gamble describes how during the silly season “200-pound men start climbing 49-cent stepladders to wire dimestore angels to the tops of three-dollar Christmas trees and wind up in a $500 plaster cast.

(from Acknowledgments) For some years I have profited from an in-house, informal but ongoing seminar on organizational behavior, a seminar comprising my wife, our three children, and three children-in-law. They have shared their insights into the functions and dysfunctions of the organizational settings in which they have worked, which include government, education, and medicine. I am indebted to all of them, though none are responsible for the uses to which I have put their observations. Eli Muller first drew my attention to the larger themes of The Wire (episodes of which he can quote chapter and verse), and his acute analysis of institutional dynamics finds its echoes in the pages of this book, which he also helped to edit. Thanks go to Joseph Muller, M.D., for orienting me in the literature of medicine and healthcare, as well as his sage advice about the tone and direction of the book. My wife, Sharon, was the first reader and editor of every chapter, and many of the book's ideas were born or refined in our daily conversations (when we weren't talking about the immeasurable pleasures of grandparenthood--but that's the subject of another book). Completion of this book was eased by the support of my parents. I'm saddened to note that this is the last project that I was able to discuss with mt father, Henry Muller, who passed away when the manuscript was nearing completion: his memory is a blessing. My mother, Bella Muller, remains a vigorous source of wisdom, encouragement, and humor in my life.

Everyone is keen to show photos of their latest holiday or new car but not so many are keen to share photos of their bathroom scales post-holiday, or the final demand from the car finance company. For all I know, Connor sold a kidney to buy the house, or at very least tied himself into a crippling mortgage. My brain isn’t wired that way though, and I feel inadequate. It’s that inadequacy which contributed to the depression episode.

The man looked at him dispassionately in the gray morning light. With one hand he pinched together the Professor’s nostrils. When the Professor opened his mouth to breathe, the man swiftly seized his tongue and pulled on it with all his might. The Professor was gagging and catching his breath; he did not see what was happening. He could not distinguish the pain of the brutal yanking from that of the sharp knife. Then there was an endless choking and spitting that went on automatically, as though he were scarcely a part of it. The word “operation” kept going through his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness. The caravan left sometime toward midmorning. The Professor, not unconscious, but in a state of utter stupor, still gagging and drooling blood, was dumped doubled-up into a sack and tied at one side of a camel. The lower end of the enormous amphitheater contained a natural gate in the rocks. The camels, swift mehara, were lightly laden on this trip. They passed through single file, and slowly mounted the gentle slope that led up into the beginning of the desert. That night, at a stop behind some low hills, the men took him out, still in a state which permitted no thought, and over the dusty rags that remained of his clothing they fastened a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together. One after another of these bright girdles was wired about his torso, his arms and legs, even across his face, until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales. There was a good deal of merriment during this decking-out of the Professor. The Professor was no longer conscious; to be exact, Even when all his wounds had healed and he felt no more pain, the Professor did not begin to think again; he ate and defecated, and he danced when he was bidden, a senseless hopping up and down that delighted the children, principally because of the wonderful jangling racket it made. And he generally slept through the heat of the day, in among the camels.

Movies are like poems. You’re supposed to experience them in a single sitting, then let them rattle around in your mind long after. TV is like reading a novel, or playing a video game, or having a roommate. It’s this thing that’s going to be around for a while. It always wants to keep going—to be more, to give more, to tell more. There’s room for nooks and crannies. Bottle episodes. Winking callbacks across baffled time, like Amy Madison stuck as a rat for a whole season of Buffy or that one half-second shot of Superintendent Rawls in the crowd at the gay bar in The Wire.