Carlene Talbott

“She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Dad, I need to talk to you about something that’s been bothering me for a long time. Remember when you and mom used to have fights and she would leave? I wanted her to stay and when I knew she wasn’t, I wanted to go with her. But, she would say, ‘stay with your father, you’re a boy.’ It’s a feeling of abandonment that I’ve never been able to shake. I had the same feeling when Sarah left me.”
― Behcet Kaya, Treacherous Estate

“The first duty of the command and control system is to survive,” Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks,” sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran’s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret communications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“When a human lighthouse sees you in the midst of your storm, it points you toward safety and protection. In doing so, it also sends you and uncompromising message of belief: Yes, the situation is difficult, but you are not alone. I’m standing right here with you, and I know the way home.”
― Steve Pemberton, The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World