Jonathan Stone > Quotes

“Lives that have had their turn now take their turn observing other lives.”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“Do not openly show your camera/smart phone in busy areas.”
― Jonathan Stone, Barcelona Scams - A Visitor's Guide to Avoiding Common Street Scams for 2013

“But it’s like anything: the more you practice, the better you get, so getting experienced in one marriage only makes you better in the other two.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“The ethos of survival for six thousand years in a cruel surrounding world, the inchoate vision of a fragile existence – it doesn’t have much to do with their own individual experiences.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“dogs”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“There’s no great liberation, no great relief in release. Your thoughts, your feelings, your interior life doesn’t change much on either side of the gate. In here or out there, you’re still sentenced to be who you are.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“her purse. Evan Nussbaum, Det. 114th Precinct, City of New York. It would be one quick phone call, one quick urgently whispered sentence—the truck driver and Desirio are sitting together in a diner—as if each of them carries an electric charge and their union produces instant ignition, and Nussbaum would be here immediately. But she has stolen 1.3 million dollars. Not spent a dime of it, no, but moved it, transferred it, and therefore stolen it . . . and therefore can hardly risk more contact with a detective of the New York Police Department. A moment later, the big truck driver and Desirio are up out of the booth and heading toward the door. And at the same time, clearly choreographed—obviously summoned by cell phone—a big silver sedan pulls up to the door of the diner and Desirio and the truck driver look both ways before ducking purposefully, wordlessly, into the back of it. Shit. As the sedan pulls away and stops in a moment at a red light, Elaine steps out of the shadows, raises her hand high above her head, waves it around irrationally, frantically. As if to halt the silver sedan purely on the strength of her authority, through the power of her righteousness, for the obviousness of the vehicle’s illicitness. But the frantically waving hand is, in fact, searching for a telltale flank”
― Jonathan Stone, The Teller

“So…any thoughts on the differences between poetry and prose?’ There is silence at first.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“A meaningless question is the equivalent of nonsense, and nonsense has no place in the study of law and morality,’ adds Adler somberly.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“The quiet disappearance of rugelach, and blintzes, and the chef who created them. Mere precursors, obvious signals, to what comes next.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“when the question is why me?, the answer is: why not me?)”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“The marriages were simultaneous, but obviously the weddings were sequential. May 30, August 14, October 16. A spring wedding, a summer wedding, a fall wedding.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“Each of them got caught, and he hasn’t been caught yet. Simple as that. For some of them, the president’s electoral victory was their victory. A vindication, a quiet affirmation of their life choices.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“I’m going to pass out a section of this poem from Walt Whitman. Song of Myself.’ ‘Song of Myself. I like the guy’s focus,’ says Nadler. And so Poetry 101 begins.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“In a medium or maximum security federal prison, they’d be called a wolf pack – and be feared. In here, though, the wolves slouch, joke, take a long nap. And when these wolves howl, it’s with laughter.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“She had always felt such impulses, ever since she was a kid. Passing a cop on the street, she’d have the impulse to grab the gun from his belt. Sitting at a glass table or passing a huge glass window, she’d feel the impulse to break it with a rock, to put an object through it. The impulse to shout out a curse word in the middle of class. To grab a candy bar in a bodega. To run into the middle of a parade or up onstage during the middle of a play.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Teller

“(Marty Adler: matrimonial fraud, nine years; married to three women simultaneously, CEO of three family businesses concurrently)”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“taught him how to test the trash can food first—how to hold it in his mouth, what to taste for, to know it was OK to eat, before swallowing.”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“Was he out there, on Pennsylvania Avenue, while they’re in here, because he proved better at it?”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“Pecoskowitz. Not everything is what it seems, after all. The”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“mistake. He pours her”
― Jonathan Stone, The Teller

“The accounts are swept for irregularities every evening at the bank’s closing. The computer programs are impressive in that regard—sophisticated, sensitive—and their algorithms are able to identify irregularities with a high level of certainty. But a computer is only half the story. A human has to see it. A human has to be assigned to look at the readouts, examine the data more closely, double-check it, trace it back, put two and two together.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Teller

“rounded, satisfying weight of the simplicity of the idea. He looks at them.”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“A lonely, dead old man. She breaks her gaze away, spreads the bedspread flat and neat”
― Jonathan Stone, The Teller

“focused everything there. And it became”
― Jonathan Stone, The Cold Truth

“We must be able to tell the story of our lives to ourselves. We tell ourselves a good story. That allows us to live with ourselves.”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“9781477818244”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“Imaginative scams, sure, thinks Sorcher – but no imagination as people. Imaginative scams because they have no imagination as people?”
― Jonathan Stone, The Prison Minyan

“Technology is the opposite of mystery. Technology is the end of mystery. Puts the lie to mystery. Makes everything explicit.”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day

“of the alarm two nights ago brought back the strong emotions”
― Jonathan Stone, Moving Day