Tracyene

“I'll play your fucking game. But I don't have to play by your rules.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train

“The gangster is the man of the city,
with the city's language and knowledge,
with its queer and dishonest skills
and its terrible daring,
carrying his life in his hands like a placard,
like a club.”
― Robert Warshow

“Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.”
― Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker

“I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist – only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited