Simon

“I learn things late—and only the hard way.”
― James Ellroy, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

“BLOW JOB—Where explosive is used on a safe.”
― Jack Webb, The Badge

“The major stumbling block for coping well with our conflicts in living with each other is set up when we interfere with another person’s decision-making process, when we routinely manipulate our fellow man’s wants by making him feel anxiously threatened, guilty, or ignorant.”
― Manuel J. Smith, When I Say No, I Feel Guilty: How to Cope, Using the Skills of Systematic Assertive Therapy

“The system worked because felons and misdemeanants plead guilty most of the time and did not file nuisance appeals routinely. The system worked because pre-breakdown jail time was doable. Criminals were pre-psychologized. They accepted authority. They knew they were lowlife scum because they saw it on TV and read it in the papers. They were locked into a rigged game. Authority usually won. They took pleasure in picayune triumphs and reveled in the game’s machinations. The game was insiderism. Insiderism and fatalism were hip. If you stayed shy of the gas chamber, the worst you’d get was penitentiary time. Pre-breakdown joint time was doable. You could drink pruno and fuck sissies in the ass. The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places