Educators From The United States

"This man wouldn’t stop until he killed Korena. Killed her. Clark couldn’t let that happen."

"“This is Cassidy Shaw, reporting to you live from the Barbur Bargain Motel in Southwest Portland.”"

"Without hesitation, she made a fist and hit herself in the right eye, her knuckles making contact with the top of her cheekbone. And then she poured milk into her coffee."

"Cassidy had been drawn to the crime beat because of its guaranteed drama. It offered murders, kidnappings, armed robbery, and the occasional hostage situation. But predictable it wasn’t."

"Today would mark another turning point. Just like the day she found the lump. The day she told Leif to leave her alone."

"The only way out was to do what Sissy demanded—go out and kill this woman and her little boy. And then try to forget he had ever done it."

"There were three types of people in the world, Elizabeth believed. Some, like Cassidy, were naïve and full of ridiculous scruples that held them back from ever enjoying life. Others, like that Allison and Nicole, were phonies who pretended to care about others. And some—only a few—were like her. Strong enough to take what they could. And smart enough not to get caught."

"The last book, the one on the bottom, was a copy of the 1,500-page Gray’s Anatomy. The weight was all wrong in her hands. She opened the cover, revealing a space hollowed out with surgical precision."

"It took all of her considerable strength to heave the girl’s wrapped body into her arms, pivot, and let it thump into the trunk."

"Jenna stumbled backward, her eyes on the woman who slammed the door behind her with one foot while both hands held a gun. A big gun. Pointed right at Jenna."

"“But she’s your daughter!” “You think I don’t know that?” Donna Mitchell’s dark eyes, so like Allison’t own, drilled into her. “But I don’t do her any favors if I keep enabling her. I’m not going to rescue Lindsay from the consequences of her own self-destructive behavior anymore. The last time she was here, I told her if she left that was it. And she still did.”"

"Fire was everything Joey wanted to be. Exciting. Dangerous. Beautiful. Destructive. And yet he controlled it. Other people were too boring, too afraid to do what he did."

"These days everything went through the filter of knowing that she might be dying. And not a lot made it through."

"Cassidy was watching Elizabeth with something like awe. This was a side to her that Allison hadn’t seen before. Cassidy seemed to long for this woman’s approval, automatically doing everything a little bigger and better any time Elizabeth’s gaze turned in her direction"

"Then there were Cassidy and Allison, her best friends. She knew she could count on them to support her, at least in their own ways. But either of them, when faced with something that might be bearing down on her like a freight train—how rational and lucid would they be?"

"Mike Stone was Portland’s premier lawyer—if you were in deep, deep trouble. He took on clients other lawyers avoided—swim team coaches accused of child molestation, surgeons who had operated while three sheets to the wind, bank presidents caught embezzling millions…Just being defended by Stone was a sure sign that you were involved in something embarrassing or off-putting"

"Living with Grandma had taught Elizabeth the basic rules. At Grandma’s she had learned that you were either a giver or a taker, predator or prey. And Cassidy Shaw had all the hallmarks of prey"

"The resume was a work of art. It listed jobs she had never held at health clubs that never existed, promotions that had never happened, professional memberships in nonexistent organizations, awards she had never received, and a fake degree. Accompanying it were letters of recommendation she had written herself."

"Elizabeth’s gaze roamed over the V of his shoulders, his strong arms, his black hair silvering at the temples. Yum."

"“So are you saying,” Allison asked, “that there’s a little bit of sociopath in all of us?”"

"“But sociopaths don’t see other people as people. Something’s wrong with their wiring,” Nicole said. “They don’t have any empathy, and they don’t feel fear. So they don’t feel guilty when they kill. If anything, they feel powerful."

"”He’s a med student,” Cassidy protested. “Someone who is supposed to save lives, not take them.”"

"“…no matter whether it was day, evening, or weekend, because she was an FBI agent, Nicole had to be fit and ready for duty at all times. She rarely drank more than a single glass of wine in the evening, and she carried her Glock to dinner, to the grocery store, and to her kid’s third-grade play”"

"Fire made Joey powerful. He could cause ordinary, boring people to wake in fright. He made the alarms sound. Made the fire trucks race down the road, sirens wailing. And right behind them stampeded the television cameras and reporters. All of them eager to look upon his handiwork….Without fire, Joey was nothing."

"“In her head, Elizabeth called what she did ‘The Game.’ The rules were simple: to pretend to be whatever someone else needed until they gave you whatever you needed. After that, there were no rules. The Game was fair, at least to Elizabeth’s way of thinking. Anyone could play it. In fact, she was sure most people were playing it; they just didn’t like to admit it. Sure, there were a few losers and idiots, suckers who, for whatever reason, didn’t mind getting played. And some people were so weak that they played poorly, basically inviting anyone to take advantage of them.”"

"“At their ten-year high school reunion, they realized they all had something in common: crime. Cassidy covered it, Nicole investigated it, and Allison prosecuted it. At the time, Nicole was working for the Denver FBI field office, but not long afterward she was transferred to Portland. At Allison’s suggestion the three women met for dinner, and a friendship began. They had half-jokingly christened themselves the Triple Threat Club in honor of the Triple Threat Chocolate Cake they had shared that day.”"

"The theater workshop can become a place where teachers and students meet as fellow players, involved with one another, ready to connect, to communicate, to experience, to respond, and to experiment and discover."

"The most significant change in the games themselves is the addition of 'Follow the Follower' (p 62), a variation on the 'Mirror' game in which no one initiates and all reflect. This game quiets the mind and frees players to enter a time, space, a moment intertwined with one another in a non-physical, non-verbal, non-analytical, nonjudgmental way."

"Don't initiate! Follow the initiator! Follow the follower."

"Reach for it, you know. Go push yourself as far as you can."

"No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson."

"I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!"

"What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars."

"I Touch the Future — I Teach."

"May your future be limited only by your dreams!"

"Why isn't someone smarter than us doing this?"

"As was brilliantly documented in Michael Lewis's book Flash Boys, Wall Street makes billions by buying huge quantities of stocks and bonds and then selling them shortly thereafter. The big investment houses and hedge funds have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in super-highspeed computers that detect the slightest price movements, then execute trades in mere fractions of a second. Once the price goes up-sometimes by just a fraction of a penny per share, and after just a few seconds or even less the traders dump the securities. When repeated tens of millions of times, the practice reaps an unbelievably enormous profit for Wall Street."

"If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview."

"People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed."

"The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets – and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life."

"The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high frequency traders, when you think about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses."

"They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only when they had an edge. That’s why they were able to trade for five years without losing money on a single day."

"It was neither healthy nor good when public stock exchanges introduced order types and speed advantages that high-frequency traders could use to exploit everyone else. This sort of inefficiency didn't vanish the moment it was spotted and acted upon. It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken."

"For geniuses, they are really dumb,” she said. “Some of them are really pampered: They can’t even put together a cardboard box. They don’t think you do something. They think you call somebody."

"Thus the only Goldman Sachs employee arrested by the FBI in the aftermath of a financial crisis Goldman had done so much to fuel was the employee Goldman asked the FBI to arrest."

""Liquidity" was one of those words Wall Street people threw around when they wanted the conversation to end, and for brains to go dead, and for all questioning to cease."

"The SEC staffer argued that it was unfair that high-frequency traders couldn’t post phony bids and offers on the exchanges to extract information from actual investors without running the risk of having to stand by them."

"The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice."

"Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen."

"The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them."