“Well, pardon me for not knowing about the thermal-only panty rule,” I said, smirking as he dipped his head to nuzzle one of the silky bra cups. “I’ll rush right out and buy some long johns.”Pausing to look up with perfect sincerity, he promised, “If you do, I will weep. Like a little girl. In public.””
“F. Franklin the Fourth has a job with a firm rich in heritage, money and pretentiousness, a firm vastly superior to Brodnax and Speer. His sidekicks at the moment are W. Harper Whittenson, an arrogant little snot who will, thankfully, leave Memphis and practice with a mega-firm in Dallas; J. Townsend Gross, who has accepted a position with another huge firm; and James Straybeck, a sometimes friendly sort who's suffered three years of law school without an initial to place before his name or numerals to stick after it. With such a short name, his future as a big-firm lawyer is in jeopardy. I doubt if he'll make it.””
“For just as we communicate to one another the good news of God’s love when we forgive one another, so too we communicate to the world that God has sent his Son when we are one as God is one (John 17:21). Disunity, on the other hand, communicates to the world that God has not sent his Son.””
“A clear look back on the Cold War's battlegrounds, along with a sense of relief that the world survived forty-five years of confrontation, evokes feelings of humility and regret.””
“I didn’t “teach” Ron Hansen or Stephen Wright or T. Coraghessan Boyle or Susan Taylor Chehak or Allan Gurganus or Gail Harper or Kent Haruf or Robert Chibka or Douglas Unger how to write, but I hope I may have encouraged them and saved them a little time. I did nothing more for them than Kurt Vonnegut did for me, but in my case Mr. Vonnegut”
“In the heated atmosphere after the Lincoln assassination, quite a few northerners compared Lee to the infamous John Brown, the abolitionist who was captured, tried, and hanged for the Harper's Ferry raid in 1859. Brown had been found guilty of treason against the state of Virginia after a jury deliberated for only forty-five minutes...Coincidentally, it had been Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army that eventually put down John Brown's short-lived rebellion at Harper's Ferry.””
“I proved him a liar but John made him look like a fool. All the time Ewell was on the stand I couldn’t dare look at John and keep a straight face. John looked at him as if he were a three-legged chicken or a square egg. Don’t tell me judges don’t try to prejudice juries.””
“I really can't tell at this stage, Jack. You know, I'd hoped to get through life without a case of this kind, but John Taylor pointed at me and said, 'You're It.””
“One of the fundamental priorities of the Harper government is to shrink the size of the state. Permanently. Shrinking the size of the state is Harper’s single greatest imperative. It is what makes him a genuinely conservative prime minister, and this Conservative government the first truly conservative government in Canada’s history.””
“Harper had so wanted to destroy the Liberal Party, to reshape Canadian politics along American or British or Australian lines, with a dominant party of the centre right – his – and a dominant party of the centre left – the NDP, or the Liberal New Democrats, or whatever emerged; he really didn’t care. He might have pulled it off, had Patrick Brazeau landed a lucky knockout punch against Trudeau in the first round.””
“As someone with an M.A. in economics, Harper knew that economists would howl. The GST is a highly efficient tax – well nigh impossible to avoid and virtually immune to loopholes. But Harper wasn’t after the economist vote.””
“If I learned one thing that day, it was that Peter Bartholomew, Arnulf, even Saint John the Divine had all been wrong. The world did not have to end with ten-horned beasts and dragons, angels and fantastical monsters. The prophets who foretold those things had succumbed to the extravagance of their imaginations, and it had played them false. Nothing on earth could be so terrible as men.””
“Politics and the stock market are the two most ruthless environments outside an actual battlefield. The market creates and destroys wealth; politics creates and destroys power. Power and wealth are both highly prized, and those who acquire large amounts of either are unlikely to be gentle souls.””
“I love you, too, John Beckett. I love you with all of my scarred heart.” ””