"Haven't you heard the expression, ‘He brings out the worst in me?’
Well, how long before the worst sticks?"
Laney Dracos
"You come into a new office. You find out how the game is played,
and you play it. If you refuse to play, it's not because you're more
ethical, or smarter, it's simply because, maybe you're a little dull."
Babs Easton
"God of sorry bastards, protect me."
Manny Eden
"White trash slut!"
Nancy Reagan
"You mean that anti-Christian, tree-hugging, union-loving, invalid
liberal prick actually saw fit to forgive me?"
Counsel Madison
"His name was Chain E., or Changey, or Chicanery, or something like
that. He was standing there, outside the booth, watching us like a
buzzard, talking sideways out of his mouth."
Deejah Thoris
"So wise, so young, do never live long."
Basil Hunsecker
"Also, wear a rubber band around your wrist. If you feel worry
coming on, just snap yourself."
Babs Easton
"You mean to tell me that in your broad travels from Kenosha to D.C.
you haven't figured out that sneaky shits rule the universe?"
Laney Dracos
"To protect and serve the nation, you first have to protect and serve
yourself."
Garner Grimstead
"Through exposure to incongruous juxtapositions and deliberate
enigma, my guests are forced to reassess reality, and themselves."
Emperatriz Soors
"Do you have a feel for these atomic levels of whoring?"
Marengo Whistleblower
No lips move, no muttering, except beneath skin. Hands and limbs
quiver, and jerk, smooth themselves out, gliding quiet and deliberate in
a routine way, as though an excuse must be found, as if all meretricious
motion, all peculiar and visible intention must be made unquestionably
defensible.
C 4
On Monday mornings apprentice brown-nosers prowl the halls for me,
alert as predators having sniffed a wound, a bleeding in the air.
The Whistleblower's Lament
Like his Britannic Majesty's minister, Sir John Merry, Lord Madison
had found it necessary to placate (and far too often) the brazen,
tobacco-chewing blackguards of the new Republic. He could not help
but share the observation of Sir John who, in his London dispatch of
1807, defined democracy as "the dregs having got to the top."
C 20
"I wish to share my outrage at what has transpired, and in doing so,
reveal to the world those conditions which allow a tiny group of
individuals to engage in legal murder. "
Dr. Bo Hammer
The despised whistleblowers were left hanging by their thumbs, their
fingers plugging a thousand dykes from St. Croix to Anchorage, their
conscience tested in a war of nips and bites spread thin by time,
apathy, and a Gulag psychology.
C 21
"Female whistleblowers have fewer death-threat fantasies than males.
You think, Varsana?"
Babs Easton
The shadows of gods roaming the horizon symbolize not only the
western Lamb and Satan, but all the Elder Gods of the Hebrews,
Hittites, Greeks, Babylonians and so forth—ancient super beings
awakened from hibernation and now preparing to depart for more
gullible worlds, humiliated beyond endurance by the more powerful
and televised idols of the Reagan White House.
C 24
"If you want, you can sabotage your new career at OWC by joining
her Whiner Relief Agency, a private nonprofit she set up on her own
without permission—and included in the package is the old
Whistleblower's Home, a half-way house for lowlife office psychos."
Varsana Pardo
Neither bureaucrat spoke or breathed, their faces solid, their eyes fixed
on divergent angles. They envisioned a creature vaguely like
themselves, a crying animal thing somewhat discomforting, and yet, for
some reason, unable to inspire pity.
C 27
"You can be fired rather quickly, so don’t force us to arrange that. We
are masters of theater, rumor, and the careful seeding of evidence."
Rochambeau
At this point, for Manny Eden, the sobering ratio of life-to-time
weighed heavily against the two bosses while the act of murder became
a moral and Hamlet-like obligation.
C 26
"Stupid, dangerous things. They’re here, on the loose … all around
us."
Laney Dracos
