People From Washington State

"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"

"Tommy locked his doors, armed his security system, replaced all the 9-volt batteries in his smoke detectors, made sure the gun in his dresser drawer was loaded, and went to bed where, before falling asleep, he recited a psalm from memory, with an emphasis on one line in particular: “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me . . .”"

"“Which was crazier, she wondered, seeing patterns when they weren’t there, or ignoring patterns when they obviously were?”"

"“Amos was the first child they’d taken in, adopted at age six through an accredited agency in the former Soviet Union. “"

"“He’d been fearless on the football field, but he couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see or understand. Suddenly, he wasn’t feeling fearless anymore.”"

"“He turned his head, reacted in a microsecond, and hit the deck just before a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball zipped past his ear and clanged into the wire backstop. Had the pitch been another inch lower or a few miles an hour faster, he would have been beaned and, at that speed, possibly killed.”"

"“Be more than careful,” he told her. “Be totally paranoid. Err on the side of caution.”"

"“Would it be possible for somebody to hypnotize you into killing somebody?”"

"“maybe you were visited by… an angel,” Carl said. ““An angel dressed as a biker?” Tommy asked."

"“It was not the sense that something had been there. It was the sense that something was still there, palpable but not visible. A sense (and now he thought he was really losing his mind) that the forest was grieving, or that something in it was dying…a feeling, if he had to name it, that evil had been there.”"

"“It was times like these that she questioned the path she’d chosen—she wanted to do work that was important, that made a difference, and she was good at what she did, but she was still shocked and disheartened by the evil things people did to each other.”"

"Elizabeth. A killer. A sociopath. A human scorpion. And Cassidy had let her ride on her back."

"Without the safety of the flotation device, or the pool bottom beneath her feet, Makayla was suddenly drowning in fear."

"In a low voice Sara told them about going to the park, seeing a man, and then not paying much attention to him until suddenly he was pushing a gun into her ribs as she unlocked her front door. “He said he had to kill me or someone would kill him.”"

"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.”"

"“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 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?”"

"Gaseous nebulae offer outstanding opportunities to atomic physicists, spectroscopists, plasma experts, and to observers and theoreticians alike for the study of attenuated ionized gases. These nebulae are often dusty, heated by radiation fields and by shocks. They are short-lived phenomena on the scale of a stellar lifetime, but their chemical compositions and internal kinematics may give important clues to advanced stages of stellar evolution."

"The wastage of the skills and talents of our capable young scientists is a disgrace to the world. The resources exist to put them all to work doing constructive things. Instead of that the substance of the earth is expanded on frivolities, on all kinds of power wasting devices and gas guzzling cars. Worst of all is the expenditure of technical expertise, energy and money on the arms race. Despite the wherewithal to wipe man off the face of the earth, ten times over, there is clamor to squander even more."

"... in the late 1940s, as the new technique of radio astronomy was developed, a brand new window was opened on the universe. Through this window the outer world looked strangely different. Copious amounts of power were emitted by streams of charged particles moving with nearly the velocity of light in vast magnetized clouds in the deep recesses of space. Additional windows are now available. The infrared, the domain of heat radiation where we could see but darkly, is intensively being explored — thanks to great technological advances. Observations with satellites flown above the earth's atmosphere have wonderfully expanded our horizons. The International Ultraviolet Explorer, IRAS, and Einstein are but three examples of instruments that have revolutionized our understanding the ultraviolet, the infrared, and the X-ray regions. Ground-based radio observations, together with X-ray and gamma-ray detectors flown in satellites, have established the active field of high-energy astrophysics. The mysterious cosmic rays, long a province worked by a small band of devoted physicists, were shown to be an integral part of the expanding scene. Radio galaxies and quasars revealed powerhouses of unbelievably high wattage radiating in remote space, while pulsars made sense only in terms of incredibly dense cores of defunct stars, where the very nuclei of the atoms, themselves, were simply squeezed beyond redemption. In some instances, matter was even further crushed into black holes from which nothing, neither particle nor radiation, can ever escape."

"I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take. Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister."

"Cynics and physics students put it like this:"

"Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism for the trivial or inaccurate... Thus, it is the communication process which is at the core of the vitality and integrity of science..."

"The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?"

"(about Exhalation) If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that we should take time to appreciate the miracle of existence and cherish the free will we have to pursue our destinies — while we still can."

"Much of modern astronomy is promised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism."

"What we now call young-earth creationism used to be common sense; up until the 1600s, it was widely assumed that the world was of recent origin. But as naturalists began looking at their environment more closely, they found clues that called this assumption into question, and over the last four hundred years, those clues have multiplied and interlocked to form the most definitive rebuttal imaginable."

"Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own."

"“But I still feel like it’s my fault.” Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”"

"He was in no position to judge these people. So what if they felt sorry for themselves? Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life."

"Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how."

"But the church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not."

"Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious."

"Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent. I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own."

"One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders. Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy."

"Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do."

"“Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions isn’t so straightforward. In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight."

"Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits."

"When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth."