The Holdout

by Graham Moore

There wasn’t a cause in this world so pure that someone couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable.

The button was a reminder of the dangers of believing yourself to be better than you were.

She was nostalgic for an imaginary future.

This wasn’t a canonization; it was an embalming.

City Hall had given him the land for one dollar, and he’d built a monument to his own civic generosity.

The world had begun to feel like a zero-sum game. Rising tides had never lifted all boats, she knew that; but now, to the extent that one rose, another seemed to roll off and crash on the shore. It was the unsparing physics of cause and effect: The wake of one boat became the wave that dashed another.

And in this way they realized that a jury’s votes were like Tolstoy’s families: All “guilty” votes had to be alike in reasoning. But all “not guilty” votes could be for different reasons and still reach the same result.

If she voted “guilty,” she was performing a rebellion against that same role. There was no way out, was there? Either she was who they wanted her to be, or she wasn’t, but either identity existed only in the shadow of their expectations.

All in all, jail wasn’t so bad.

He was crying. Maybe tears were all he had left to expel.

To Maya, “cycles” sounded too much like just deserts. She did not believe in karma. To her, violence was a sickness, a contagion. Everyone who came into contact with it became a carrier. Its survivors, its bystanders, all served to bring more violence into the world.

There was something perverse, Maya had thought at the time, about the way that a girl’s death had allowed so many of them to live out their own heroic fantasies.

somehow it felt like these people were going to collide against each other like marbles.