Status Updates From Changing the Rules

From the Acknowledgments: Slavery has never gone away, it simply went underground.

I knew he was dirty. I just couldn't find the mud.

A lot of these kids look like they could be in college. It's a curse, if you ask me. Their bodies grow up before their brains. Gets them in trouble sometimes.

Is it even fishing season?

Nothing illegal about sitting in a boat with beer. Fish jumping in the boat is just the icing.

Sometimes to steal the car, all you have to do is ask for the keys.

Who better to watch out for an assassin than someone who'd been in that role in the past?

if you want to write up the rules, by all means.

I don't have to write them down.

Yes, you do. And you'll do it in five languages.

We could go back to just friends if you’ve changed your mind.

Bite your tongue.

I’d rather bite yours.

She lifted her glass. “To life today that becomes our history tomorrow.”

Cooper marveled at how she switched gears. Yesterday she was pretending to be a smart-ass kid giving adults a run for their money, and today she was the quintessential professional that looked like she could take on a courtroom without a law degree. And she could do it in five languages.

So much strength in every inch of her body, but here, like this, she wilted and let him hold her.

Cooper pulled into Claire’s driveway long before the sun even thought of coming up.

You can't tell me you've been pining over me for six years.

I wasn't a monk, if that's what you're suggesting. But I did try and put you out of my head.

Did that work?

Yes.

Really?

No. I flew back to the States and kept lying to myself.

Rural Michigan. Which was a huge reason why I joined the service to start with. Winters suck, summers are too short.

When I signed up to work for Neil, I knew it was the right choice. It filled that part of me that I joined the service for, without tying my hands the way the service did. I thought I was the luckiest bastard in the world. I got paid doing the $h!t I love to do with enough of an adrenaline rush to make me feel alive.

How is she?

I poured her into bed. Taking tomorrow off.

You just broke up with a guy. It's a free pass for feeling sorry for yourself.

"Am I going to be one of those people who has to hide their family?"

Claire bit her lip to keep her thoughts from becoming words. At least you have a family to hide.

Education is meant to teach a subject, yes ... but it's also meant to open the eyes of the student. Make that student look for their own answers to life's big questions.

You mean Claire likes the class?

Hates it enough to study the man and not his work. But you cannot do one without the other and truly understand.

And his poor wife ... he dies and leaves his wife a bed? And he dies a month after signing his will. I have to tell ya, I wouldn't put it past Anne to reenact Macbeth and kill him herself once she realized she'd get nothing when he bit it.

You know what reading MacBeth did for me? It made me look up good old Bill's daily life. ... why didn't he write a play about marrying a cougar at eighteen after knocking her up?

And a hypocrite to his deathbed. Or at least his tombstone. In one breath he says he's a godly man and the next he's cursing you if you loot his grave. Those two things are a contradiction, don't you think?

"So you didn't take anything on purpose?"

Ally shook her head. "Not my thing."

The girl was sixteen, she didn't know what her thing was.

nystagmus: eye movement disorder

mobile headquarters, otherwise referred to as the creeper van ...

“A martini without an olive is just vodka.”

Two minutes later, as they rushed out of the parking lot, Claire was happy Neil had taught her to back into every parking space she ever used.

guess what, you're not eighteen any longer. He's not too old and you're not too young. There is zero ick factor to the two of you getting together.

Walked away when you were barely eighteen and he was what? Twenty-four, twenty-five?

(so Cooper is ~30 or 31?)

When you demand excellence, you get it. When you accept mediocrity, you get it. Remember that, if you decide to fall into the trap of being a full-time teacher.

Nothing shut a man up faster than the period card.