Jamie

“The main thrust of Burr’s argument was that citizenship came from consent. Drawing on his favorite writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burr defended the basic premise of the social contract: citizens were not born, but made, through their participation in civil society. Gallatin”
― Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

“Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Don’t talk about shit you don’t know, Billy thinks, and therein lies the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real. They have dealt much death and received much death and smelled it and held it and slopped through it in their boots, had it spattered on their clothes and tasted it in their mouths. That is their advantage, and given the masculine standard America has set for itself it is interesting how few actually qualify. Why we fight, yo, who is this we? Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk