Brown Lennox

“Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.”
― Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir

“When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years.

All business and politics is personal in the Philippines.

If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump.

They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on.

I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged.

I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy.

You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn.

Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race.

After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself.

It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up.

He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather.

The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up.

You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points]

Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse.

You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow.

In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil.

There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country.

Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us.

The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys.

The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time.

I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality.
The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent.

Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins.

Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it.

Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds.

Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising.

A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't.

Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill.

It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most.

Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold.

Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink?

She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.”
― John Richard Spencer

“Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter