Ve Neill Quotes

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Jeff, I have a problem.” “I’m glad you’ve finally realized I’m your answer, Merit.

And then his voice echoed through my head. Merit. He silently called my name, even as he stood beside her. Liege? I answered back. His eyes glinted. Don’t call me that. There is nothing else for me to call you. You are my employer.That is the deal we’ve struck.

Well, " I began,"I've been roped into shenanigans." Without preface, Catcher muttered a curse ,then leaned over slipped his wallet from his jeans, and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, which he handed to Mallory.

I'm just warning you, I'm probably going to be a total hard-ass vamp." Mallory snorted and walked out of the kitchen, calling out, "Yeah, well, you've got a purple marshmallow on your chin, hard-ass vamp.

Ethan sighed, then put a hand on my cheek. “I don’t tell you this enough, but I am incredibly proud of the vampire you’ve become. I want you to know that.

You feel like you've lost your path. It's natural to be sad. It's alright to let those feelings wash over you, and give them time to soak into the earth. That's when things start to grow again.

Girl, you’re the Sentinel of this House, and you’ve been trained by Catcher and Luc and Ethan. He’s in the training room right now. Get down there and kick his ass!

You've got better boobs," I acknowledged. And just as we'd done each time we'd had this boobs-versus-legs conversation, we looked down at our chests. Ogled. Compared.

Fair enough" I gave him. "But you've got really nice shoes." He blinked, then cast a dubious glance at his boots. "They were in my closet." I snorted and plucked at the sleeves of his jacket. "Please you've been planning this outfit for a week.

Ladies and...ladies" Luc said "since the sexual harassment has already started I assume you've recognized that we have a special guest.

Scout released me, then wiped tears from beneath her eyes. Catharsis, I guessed. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you seriously rock, Parker.” "Tell me again, Green,” I said as we switched on flashlights and headed through the tunnel. “Seriously, you rock.” “One more time.” “Don’t press your luck.

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don't myself. I've never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own.

I've been all over the place in all kinds of living situations. Due to the fact that my mind is my own worst enemy. In a way I am perpetually and permanently in a state of rehabilitation m in an attempt to rehabilitate from the shock of being born.Some people are too sensitive to withstand that.

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got—nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.

In case you’ve forgotten, Ethan Sullivan trained me. And in case you didn’t know, Catcher Bell schooled me in sword craft. I was raised on ‘difficult to work with.

In plain words, you’ve got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn’t wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it’s true, whether it’s a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it.

He grinned. "And you've got yourself a nickname. I'm thinking 'Shorty'" "I'm five eight without heels." "It's not a description. It's a nickname. Get used to it, Shorty." We stood there for a moment, waiting for the tension to evaporate. When it did, we smiled at each other. "Don't call me Shorty," I told him. "Okay, Shorty." "Seriously, that's very immature." "Whatever you say, Shorty. Let's call it a night." "Fine by me." I'd worry about the humiliation in the morning. Merit/Jonah

Your father goes out. He meets his friends in barrooms or at the Club. You and Jamie have the boys you know. You go out. But I’m alone. I’ve always been alone.

Soon, leedle proletarians, ve vill have free picnic in the cool shade, ve vill eat hot dogs and trink free beer beneath the villow trees! Like hogs, yes! Like beautiful leedle hogs!

Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You’ve got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there.

Look at Vaughan. He's done everything I've done. He drank beer, had sex, sent a nude picture. And he just got an offer from Stanford. Why is his life worth more than mine, just because he's rich and male?

You look ho-ot. Sure you don’t wanna drop this vampire business and join the Pack? We’ve got better . . . insurance.

In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke of everything but. But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

Now that we’ve done the tea party,” Luc said, pushing back the notepad and settling into his chair, “it’s time for our annual review of Rules You Disrespectful Bastards Never Follow.

Lils, you've barely even planned Sneak yet. Give it time. He'll get there." "He did ask me out on Saturday." "OMG, you two are totally getting married and having a litter of babies. Ooh, what if that's literally true?" -Scout and Lily about werewolf Jason

I believe I’ve got it covered,” Malik said with an admirably straight face and smooth tone. “But I wouldn’t mind taking a break before getting to the next round. Grabbing a bite to eat.” Ethan glanced at me, questioning eyebrow arched. Have you infected him? You’re hilarious, I said.

EDMUND *Then with alcoholic talkativeness You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping looking, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! *He grins wryly. It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a a little in love with death! TYRONE *Stares at him -- impressed. Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. *Then protesting uneasily. But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND *Sardonically The *makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

Going from the pursuit of perfection in all things to ultimate depravity isn’t a journey anybody makes in one step, it’s a series of small ones – each one justifiable in its own isolated way. But after you’ve taken a hundred of those small steps, you’re a long way from who you were at the start.

The Friend Zone An imaginary area filled with self-professed Nice Guys who've been sexually rejected by women they've been Nice to. See also: A convenient social construct designed to comfort men sho cannot cope with rejection. See also: A manipulative tool used by Nice Guys to make a woman feel guilty for not wanting to have sex with them.

They don't know. It's not their fault. What are they supposed to do when they've been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales?

What the hell is that?" he asked. "Magic mushrooms." "I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute.

Catcher, you're a boy. I've known you for like a week." Two months, actually, but who was counting? "I've known Merit for years. I mean, the sex is great and all, but she's my BFF." - Mallory

It sucks because you’re trying to do the right thing, but the result isn’t showing it. You’re at the stage where good intentions meet crappy abilities. Welcome to my first eleven months as a vampire.” “You’ve only been a vampire for ten months.” “My point exactly.

I smile sadly, in light of what came next to think that I told her If you can just hang on, things are bound to improve she made me a liar, too-- the woman who dug the hole I've been trying to write myself out of ever since

The only reason I've quit is--Well, I finally had the guts to face myself and throw overboard the damned lying pipe dream that'd been making me miserable, and do what I had to do for the happiness of all concerned--and then all at once I found I was at peace with myself and I didn't need booze any more.

Are Cady and O'Neill Ever going to get together?" Those amber eyes weighed me heavily, and then he answered my question with a question. "Do you think they should?" "Well I said, "they've been through an awful lot together. And if there's only one book left, it kind of seems like they're running out of time

Look. I know why you gave me that speech earlier today. I know you have an obligation to protect your vampires. But irrespective of the way that I was made, I have done everything that you’ve asked of me. I’ve taken training, I gave up my dissertation, I moved into the House, I got you in to see my father, I got you into the Breckenridge house, and I’ve dated the man you asked me to.” I pointed at the house behind us. “And even though I was supposed to get a few hours free from the drama of Cadogan House tonight with said man, I followed you here because you requested it. At some point, Ethan, you might consider giving me a little credit.” I didn’t wait for him to answer, but turned on my heel and went to the car. I opened the back door, climbed inside, and slammed it shut behind me. Catcher caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. “Feel better?” “Is he still standing there with that dumbstruck expression on his face?” There was a pause while he checked, then a chuckle. “Yes, he is.” “Then, yes, I feel better.

What are they supposed to do when they've been told their whole lives not to believe in fairy tales?

The troop commander's name was Rich...[and] he was one of the best leaders I've ever known. His motto, which I've stolen from him, is, 'Nobody ever worked for me. They worked with me.

I love you so damn much, Izzy, and just because I'm not Channing Tatum I've been relegate to the Friend Zone for the rest of eternity. I have to watch you chase the same good-looking assholes that every other girl wants to fuck, then pick up the pieces after they inevitable screw you over.

I’m an asset,” I said remorsefully. “If he gets pissed, it’s because you’ve endangered his weapon.” “Merit, if you really believe that, I have been giving you way too much credit.” His expression was serious enough to put surprise in mine. “Then he has an odd way of showing it.” “Babe, he’s a vampire.

It didn’t matter what my father said – that Alex was lazy, that all he cared about was having fun. Well, I wanted to have fun, for once. Fun, I could appreciate. I’ve never cared for beauty. Beauty fades, there’s no loyalty in it. My mother told me it was better to cultivate my wit, my intelligence. If I’d had a daughter, I would have told her the same. I would have made her strong. A woman needs to be strong to survive.

Standing on the front steps and trying to catch my breath, I want to claw my skin off. Despite all of the things that make me me - my personality, my heart, my sense of humor - I've been reduced to nothing more than a grainy filter and a pair of tits. To a mere sex object. I wonder whether I'll ever stop feeling so dirty.

Seeing everyone her like this, I want to share something with you all. This is something I began a long time ago, and for a while I didn't know how to continue it . . . but I've decided to fill it up with the things that bring me joy each day! this is my story now, and although it's not the one I expected happy that it's mine.

I love you, Ethan, and I love this city. And however much I fought, I love this goddamn House. It's part of me, and I'm part of it. I'm not going to stand here and watch a man tear down everything that you've build. I'm not. And if that means I have to chase another man who threatens this House, or apologize to you more than I like, so be it. I don't want that, but I can live with it. Because I can't live without you.

Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

I’ve thought of a reason,” Kit MacNeill said

Like they say, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.

Luc is busy protecting our vampires.” “Luc is your bodyguard. He swore an oath to protect you.” An irritated shake of his head. “You’re in this already.” “Luc was there when you explained the raves, helped you plan for my involvement, and I’m sure you’ve brought him up to speed about what we learned so far. He knows everything that I know.” “Luc was busy.” “I was busy.” “Luc isn’t you.

I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude - we've proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure. If being an iterator has taught me anything, it's that men of words - priests, prophets and intellectuals - have played a more decisive role in history than any military leaders or statesmen." - Kyril Sindermann

Allowing. People tend to make very bad choices based on fear and force themselves to stay in or choose relationships which are neither healthy nor a good fit for them. For instance, thought patterns based on fear go like this: • “This relationship is so hard, but we’ve been together forever, and I hate to throw it all away.” • “We fight so much, but when we get along, it’s really great.” • “I think it’s best to stay together for the kids.” • “This is what marriage is supposed to be like, no point in doing it all over again.” These are all thoughts based on the fear of being alone. When misery is more tolerable than the thought of being alone, it’s really pretty sad. When you force yourself to stay in a situation (love or otherwise), which feels like such a struggle, even when you can choose a different route…well,

He takes a glass from a passing waiter, but doesn’t thank him. He rarely thanks the staff, I’ve observed. All the little things that I have ignored about this man, in order to make the narrative of true love and destiny fit. I tried to make him as perfect as I needed him to be.

You've been a naughty kit-kat. Silly bad thing. Dirty raggedy scamp. You'll go straight to hell,' said Rose. 'Yes. You've been bad and whiny. You don't get milk. No milk at all. No milk one bit. No milk for you.,' insisted Pierrot. ''If you cry, I'm going to poke you in the nose.' 'Owww! Owww! Owww! I don't want to hear it.' You smell bad. You have to scrub your paws. Bath time. Stinky creep.' 'Naughty sinner, naught, naughty, naughty. With mud for paws.' 'Soooo shameful. Look at me. Mister Shameful.' They had never been taught words of affection. Although the two had only known harsh terms and words of discipline, they had managed to transform them into words of love.

Maryland cop Neill Franklin. “Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect

He wants you,” Lindsey said. “Physically and otherwise. Maybe you only need to remind him that you can handle yourself.” “How?” “Girl, you’re the Sentinel of this House, and you’ve been trained by Catcher and Luc and Ethan. He’s in the training room right now. Get down there and kick his ass.” I smiled slyly. Now, that was a plan that made sense.

School House was pretty easy to remember, and spell, and just as well, because many of the boys there were the product of generations of inbreeding. Canterbury farming families, for some reason, like to marry among their own. The gene pool is very small. You would think that a cursory examination of how they bred their Corriedale sheep would’ve been helpful in this regard. Sadly, no.

The friction began at this first meeting. O’Neill was not initially impressed with Reagan and said to him, “You’ve been a governor of a state, but a governor plays in the minor leagues. You’re in the big leagues now.” (O’Neill had said the same thing to Jimmy Carter four years before.) Reagan replied, “Oh, you know, no problem there.” Despite the genial response, O’Neill’s comment represented the very kind of Washington haughtiness that set Reagan’s teeth on edge. Aides to the president-elect were incensed.

Art as activism. Like Banksy?" "Man, Banksy's some white-ass bullshit. Sorry," he apologizes hastily, as though he might've offended my white-ass feelings. [...] "A'ight, so the dude flew out to Gaza to spray-paint a kitten on a house that'd been destroyed in an air strike. Like, the fuck? Talk about insensitive. Then our white savior has the audacity to call it art, to demand folks listen to his views on the atrocities of war, rather than the Palestinians who lived through it." He shakes his head, his hand tensing and untensing in mine. "Sorry. Shit drives me crazy sometimes.

Meanwhile, Hawaiian politicians tried to make up for lost time by officially granting cops the “right” to rape sex workers by spelling the permission out in the text of the new prostitution law. When a legislator discovered this provision in 2015 and rewrote the law to scrap it, the cops demanded that their decades-old droit du seigneur remain in place, and it probably would’ve had not the media gotten hold of the story and a public outcry not ensued. Now there’s a movement to decriminalize sex work there, which might at last free Hawaiian whores from the tender mercies of cops.

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were “Now comes the mystery.” The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, “I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record,” before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: “Born in a hotel room, and—God damnit— died in a hotel room.” Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, “Oh God. What's happened?” Movie star James Dean said, “They've got to see us,” just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

That's the second reporter to call me 'boyish.'" "Boyish is nice," Dee offers. He tips his head towards her. "I'm nineteen. I'm not boyish." "It's your hair," I tell him without glancing up from the magazine, and Dee laughs. "My hair?" he asks, incredulous. "What's wrong with my hair?" "Nothing. But you had it that way when you were younger, right? During the Finch Four years?" He frowns. "Yeah, I guess. I don't know." "Yeah," Dee says. "You did. Same haircut. Kind of almost shaggy." "Shaggy?" "Yeah." I gesture near his ear. "It sort of starts to curl right here. The look is a little..." Dee and I both study his face for a moment. "...boyish," Dee decides. We both giggle, and Matt's eyes widen as if we've betrayed him. "Girls are mean! I'm bailing out of this bus at the next rest stop." "Unlikely," I tell him.

At one point in late 2017, he was scheduled to be on a Tesla earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Jon McNeill, who was then Tesla’s president, found him lying on the floor of the conference room with the lights off. McNeill went over and lay down next to him in the corner. “Hey, pal,” McNeill said. “We’ve got an earnings call to do.” “I can’t do it,” Musk said. “You have to,” McNeill replied. It took McNeill a half-hour to get him moving. “He came from a comatose state to a place where we could actually get him in the chair, get other people in the room, get him through his opening statement, and then cover for him,” McNeill recalls. Once it was over, Musk said, “I’ve got to lay down, I’ve got to shut off the lights. I just need some time alone.” McNeill said the same scene played out five or six times, including once when he had to lie on the conference room floor next to Musk to get his approval for a new website design.

Around that time, Musk was asked by a user on Twitter if he was bipolar. “Yeah,” he answered. But he added that he had not been medically diagnosed. “Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe the real problem is getting carried away for what I sign up for.” One day, when they were sitting in the Tesla conference room after one of Musk’s spells, McNeill asked him directly whether he was bipolar. When Musk said probably yes, McNeill pushed his chair back from the table and turned to talk to Musk eye to eye. “Look, I have a relative who is bipolar,” McNeill said. “I’ve had close experience with this. If you get good treatment and your meds dialed right, you can get back to who you are. The world needs you.” It was a healthy conversation, McNeill says, and Musk seemed to have a clear desire to get out of his messed-up headspace. But it didn’t happen. His way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

Love is giving the people ye love what is best for them, Bav, no' what is best for ye. It doesna matter if it rips yer heart out by the roots first. Ye've never learned tha', no' in yer thousand thousands of years, and ye never will.

So we’ve got more balls than System Lords… globes, than System Lords.” “I believe both statements to be correct, O’Neill.” Teal’c gave Jack the eyebrow equivalent of a high five and marched off to do a perimeter check.

Commander Huron, I should like to inquire after one of your flight officers.” “Would that be Ensign Kennakris, ma’am?” “Do you always answer the question like that?” “Well, ma’am, she does have a way of getting people’s attention.” “I’ve been told she scares the living shit out of people.” “That’s one of the ways she gets their attention.

Changing a culture sounds like a tall order. And it probably is. “I think there are two critical components to policing that cops today have forgotten,” says the former Maryland cop Neill Franklin. “Number one, you’ve signed on to a dangerous job. That means that you’ve agreed to a certain amount of risk. You don’t get to start stepping on others’ rights to minimize that risk you agreed to take on. And number two, your first priority is not to protect yourself, it’s to protect those you’ve sworn to protect. But I don’t know how you get police officers today to value those principles again. The ‘us and everybody else’ sentiment is strong today. It’s very, very difficult to change a culture.

We’ve all heard the joke – Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man. I say, Lord, give me the career of a mediocre white woman. Because that’s what Samantha Miller is. Samantha Miller, in all her bland, basic glory, is the embodiment of white privilege and I, for one—

Jesus Christ. You’re forty years of age, Samantha. When are you going to stop blaming us and take responsibility for yourself? Or maybe that doesn’t suit this “narrative” you’ve created to make yourself sound

He has a point,’ agreed Scott, the equity analyst who seemed to have sweat stains on his shirt, no matter what the weather. ‘You didn’t stop to think that maybe we’ve seen similar shit in our time? We’ve been at this a lot longer than you, girls. We would have handled this quickly, quietly, and we would have made it go away.

One thing I’ve learned since becoming a civilian is that being a Navy SEAL is only part of your life. High school is a part of your life and it’s the most important thing when you’re in it. Then it’s over. For me, for over a decade, being a Navy SEAL was everything. Those hard-as-nails instructors at Coronado and the officers I served under in the years after taught me to meet, and rise above, challenges I wouldn’t have imagined. And my SEAL brothers—they taught me a sense of comradery that I still consider priceless. But to keep growing, we all have to move to the next phase. That’s life.

The truth is, Amy, the modern dating scene has made sex disposable. It’s made people disposable. I’ve come to believe that sex is sacred and we have to honour it as the force that it is. We shouldn’t throw it away on those who are not worthy of us.

I’m a human being,’ she continued. ‘I’m flawed. I’ve never pretended to be anything else. But we put people on pedestals, don’t we? We expect them to be perfect, to be fully enlightened beings. But we’re all human, we all make mistakes. And that’s OK.

Missed her? Are you kidding me? We have two beautiful children; I built you the house of your fucking dreams. When did you have the time to miss her?’ Something muffled, one of them telling the other shh, she’ll hear. ‘You’ve

And then you act like the last twenty-something years never happened and you’ve no other responsibilities except to be at Samantha Miller’s beck and call. What about the twins? If she

The company will go public in a few months, and you’ll be rich enough to retire and never work again. Listen to me.’ Her manager was serious. ‘I’ve lived in this city long enough to know that the only thing these people can’t forgive is poverty. If you have enough money, they’ll forget everything. You’ll be fine.

You made my life miserable and I’ve had to watch for the last ten years as you made a career out of being kind, preaching about the importance of “connectivity” and “collectivity” and all this shit about treating others as you’d want to be treated. I thought I was losing my fucking mind.

I’ve heard some crime syndicates use big drones.” As O’Neill waves his holo-ring at the access panel, I mime something swooping down from the sky. “They fly you away like a huge package.

RORY O’NEILL: Older gays – for want of a better description – they were used to going on marches. They still don’t think the Pride parade is a parade, they think of it as a march. They’re used to being politically engaged and fighting for things. They remember Declan Flynn getting murdered. They remember decriminalisation. It’s just part of their DNA. Obviously as you get older, most people, gay and straight, find it hard to keep up the energy for those kinds of things except for the ones who are very dedicated; the GLENs and the Marriage Equalitys and the Ailbhe Smyths and so on. The younger gays, that wasn’t part of their DNA. Going out on a march was something they never did. … They’ve never been out on the streets. To them, going out on the streets was a big party on Pride where they wore wigs and skipped along, which is great, and I love that and it’s fabulous. But it’s not a protest. They had no connection to that. And so I think [LGBT] Noise gave them not only an opportunity, but also an excuse to get involved in something like that. I think it made younger people feel they were useful. Suddenly they felt they had a power. You went to those marches, of course you did. The Marriage Equality marches, the Noise marches, there was a real energy about that, wasn’t there? A sense of all these young people out with their placards. I’m quite sure a lot of them had never walked down the street with a placard in their lives.

If only we would sit at bus stops in the discomforting silence that comes with the knowledge that we are instead antagonists, that we are implicated, if only passively, in a centuries-long campaign of oppression and extraction. A campaign waged in our name and for our pockets. Not the most pleasant way to pass the time, I admit, which is probably why we've developed such extraordinary ways to avoid doing it. But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we've been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story

Nobody will question it,” Goldie had said about the new sculpture. “They’ll come and gape at the President’s head and drive away thinking they’ve been told a happy story.

And that’s courage for the next time. And the next time. And inch by inch, you drag yourself back. Mend the knife-marks until they’re silver scars. Mop the floors until the tiles are not longer stained, and you do that once a fortnight now, because their shitty off-whiteness that collects far too much dirt and dust won’t beat you. You fix the small bits, one at a time. When you look back, you see the trail of black, oozing sick that you’ve tracked from the pit, all the way to here. It’s been a long, brutal journey. And yet, looking around, you’re shoulder to shoulder with your people, who have the same tools and same luck as you. You beat the odds, inch by inch. You haven’t won, not really, there’s no such thing, but you’re alive. You get to keep going.

Smith, who called Manson “Charlie,” ended up becoming one of the most vital figures in my investigation—more than anyone else, he knew how and why Manson had formed the Family, because he’d watched it happen. And legally, he wielded immense power over Manson. He could’ve sent him back to prison at any time.

Now, before the Church Committee, he allowed that the FBI’s ruthless pragmatism had obscured any sense of morality he and his colleagues might’ve had. “Never once,” he said, “did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’… The one thing we were concerned about was this: ‘Will this course of action work? Will it get us what we want?

read about CHAOS and COINTELPRO until I must’ve sounded, to all my friends, like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, someone who might go off on a long-winded tangent about the threats of the deep state. But the fact that the CIA has become an all-purpose scapegoat—the preeminent symbol of global power run amok—doesn’t change the fact that its abuses of power in the 1960s were legitimate and myriad. If anything, these abuses were so gross that they’ve lent authority to any and every claim against federal intelligence agencies: if the CIA and the FBI are capable of killing American citizens in cold blood, often in elaborate schemes, what aren’t they capable of?

The whole drama of contactability, of being constantly in touch and constantly on call, is weighing on me. In regular life I don’t carry a phone around. My whereabouts are not exactly a big mystery. I’m a predictable, straightforward guy. At any given moment I’m most likely to be holding the fort. If I’m out, it’ll be because I’m walking the dog or buying food or briefly riding my bike. It won’t be because I’ve put on a wingsuit and thrown myself off a cliff. And if something untoward happens, the kind of hitch or holdup that afflicts countless people every day, I handle it the way grown-ups did in the millennia before portable electronic devices: by figuring it out. The bottom line is that I’m not a package to be tracked and traced.

My apartment is comfortable but compact. The bedroom I’ve got ready for Godwin is on the small side. I didn’t know what a boy’s bedroom looked like, so I gave him exactly the bedroom I saw in the IKEA catalogue. I was concerned that he would be disappointed. But he immediately falls onto the twin bed and looks quite happy about it. I show him the pull-out storage drawers under the bed, and his closet, and his study desk. It is dark out. In the morning he will see a quiet, pleasant street. I ask Godwin if he would like to eat pizza for dinner—there is an excellent pizzeria nearby—and Mr. Lefebvre repeats my question to him in French. Godwin nods. Mr. Lefebvre declares, “Tonight we eat pizza. After that, madame, no more American food. No more hamburgers, no more fast food…” He is wagging his finger at me. Sushila, horrified, says, “Jean-Luc!” There is no need for her intervention. I have learned to manage overly direct individuals. “I agree with you, Jean-Luc,” I tell him. “An athlete must eat good food. I’m not good at cooking, but I’m excited to learn.

After lying there for a few minutes, I get out of bed. I lock the door of my bedroom. For many years, I’ve enjoyed a quiet, safe home of my own and on my own. No shouting, no strangers coming and going, no surprises, no sounds that are not mine or Cutie’s. I’m not afraid of Godwin. It feels good to have him under my roof. But his presence has the effect of filling me with suspense and fear. I’m grateful to him for this. It enables me to start fixing a problem that I now feel ready to fix.

But then, during the first days of January in 2000, the West Power Clearing Model began to produce some very strange numbers. It seemed that there was a supply crunch looming in California. The state had not built a new power plant in about a decade, and demand had been rising steadily. Water reservoirs were getting low, thanks to a dry year with little rainfall. A hot summer seemed to be on the way. Demand was high and supplies were tight, which meant that prices would soon be rising. This was essentially the same analysis that Brenden O’Neill was seeing on the natural gas desk. There would be a spike in both gas and electricity prices, which were closely connected. There was a small problem, however. California’s day-ahead market on the Power Exchange had a price cap on it. This created a potential distortion in the market: the real price of power might float higher than the capped price, which would force producers to trade at a loss. There seemed to be some gaming going on in this market in response to the price caps—it looked like some utility companies were intentionally underscheduling their loads in the day-ahead market to try and evade the price caps. The traders believed that California’s new system was imperfectly deregulated because of the price caps, and they also seemed to believe that the state’s political leaders were too dumb to recognize the fact or change it. The traders weren’t sympathetic to the idea that they should abide by the price caps if the market dictated otherwise. The thinking of Enron traders was captured in recorded phone calls, later obtained by investigators, which included gems such as: “Grandma Millie, man . . . now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged . . . jammed right up her ass for fucking two hundred fifty dollars a megawatt-hour.

If I've made a film that turns out to be good, that's a good result. If I've made a film that's good and made a couple of friends, that's a great result. If I've made a film that's no good, but I made a friend, that's still another great result.

This has been the most exciting thirteen years of my life. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of catching these people in lies, and documenting it—knowing that you’ve found something no one else has found.

I’m still convinced that would’ve been genius, a great ending to a mediocre picture.

What’s more”—O’Neill’s eyes brimmed with tears—“they’ve a cause, Grace.” She placed her hand over his. “I know that, Hugh. ’Tis an ‘Irish cause,’ and we’ve never known that here before. There’s not another man in Ireland—in all the world—who could have rallied them, you know that’s true. A single country fighting a single enemy. I never thought I’d live to see the day. Not even Red Hugh could have done it.

Before engineers and scientists had acquired experience with large quantities of liquid hydrogen, they were fearful of its explosive properties. Now, though, after several decades of working with it in laboratories and in rocketry, they've concluded that it's less dangerous than gasoline or jet fuel. In the crash of a hydrogen-fueled aircraft, the hydrogen would tend to rise very quickly because of its light weight. Though it would certainly burn, the flames and heat would be high in the air. Ordinary jet fuel stays on the ground as a liquid, soaks the clothing of crash victims, and burns them at ground level.

one thing I’ve learnt is that life isn’t about doing the right thing. It’s about not doing the wrong thing.

Jeff, I have a problem.” “I’m glad you’ve finally realized I’m your answer, Merit.