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Fugitive Quotes

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Fugitive Quotes

“Running away was not like it was in stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn't understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from. Most of the time it wasn't mothers or fathers or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will turn out all right.”

“From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long.”

“They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.”

“No one wants to learn an instrument, Rachel. It's grueling repetition. And besides, you're too old to start. Concert violinists who learn the traditional way begin when they're six or seven." Risa can't help but listen to the irritating conversation taking place between the well-dressed woman and her fashionably disheveled teenage daughter. "It's bad enough they'd be messing in my brain and giving me a NeuroWeave," the girl whines. "But why do I have to have the hands, too? I like my hands!" The mother laughs. "Honey, you've got your father's stubby, chubby little fingers. Trading up will only do you good in life, and it's common knowledge that a musical NeuroWeave requires muscle memory to complete the brain-body connection." "There are no muscles in the fingers!" the girl announces triumphantly. "I learned that in school." The mother gives her a long-suffering sigh. "Think of them like a pair of gloves, Rachel. Fancy silk gloves, like a princess wears." Risa can't stand it anymore. Making sure she's low enough so that her face can't be seen, she gets up, and as she walks past them, she says, "You'll have someone else's fingerprints.”

“The profilers’ plan to coax me out of the woods resembled a comedy skit. During their search of my Cane Creek trailer, the feds had found dozens of books on the Civil War. And interviews with my friends confirmed that I was a bona fide Civil War buff. The profilers looked at all this Civil War “stimuli” and concluded that my hiding in the mountains was a form of role-playing. Starring in my own Civil War fantasy, I was a lone rebel fighting for the Lost Cause, and the task force was a Yankee army out to capture me. To talk On August 16, the task force pulled out of the woods while Bo and his rebels went in. They had to look the part, so the FBI profilers dressed them in white hats with the word “REBEL” stenciled in red letters across the front; and around their neck each rebel wore a Confederate flag bandanna.me into surrendering, they needed some of my rebel comrades to convince me that the war was over and it was time to lay down my arms. Colonel Gritz and his crew were assigned the role of my rebel comrades. They were there to “rescue” me from the Yankee horde. Bo’s band of rebels pitched camp down in Tusquitee, north of the town of Hayesville. Beginning at Bob Allison Campground – the place where I’d abandoned Nordmann’s truck – they worked their way west into the Tusquitee Mountains. They walked the trails, blowing whistles and yelling “Eric, we’re here with Bo Gritz to save you.” They searched for a week. I lost it when I heard on the radio that the profilers had dressed Gritz’s clowns in “REBEL” hats and Confederate flag bandannas. I laughed so hard I think I broke a rib.”

“Rejecting Jesus Christ is like a fugitive who spends all day running but has nowhere to hide; you will face him after death. He is the only judge and jury.”

“He was as bold as a lion about it, and 'mightily convinced' not only himself, but everybody that heard him;—but then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,—or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with "Ran away from the subscriber" under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,—these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child,—like that one which was now wearing his lost boy's little well-known cap; and so, as our poor senator was not stone or steel,—as he was a man, and a downright noble-hearted one, too,—he was, as everybody must see, in a sad case for his patriotism.”

“The thing I hated most about moving was having to buy everything all over again; all the household objects, from furniture to silverware, that you find in any home. Normally, you buy them with the idea that they are going to last over time, be part of your everyday life, and have a history. For a fugitive, it’s different: the only criterion is temporary use, and so each and every object necessarily loses its worth. I thought of them as non-objects, the non-possessions of a non-person living a non-life.”

“I have spent my whole life preparing to be William Wallace’s wife. The choices I make are defined by the person I am. “I am Mrs. William Victor Wallace. I am married to a federal felon whom I love unconditionally. I hold my head high, I take pride in my life and I walk this world without regret. I will be the perfect wife and my husband deserves nothing less.”

“What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them. Doubtless many times these new possibilities were declared by a man who, quite unconscious of courage, bore the "sense of being an exile, a condemned criminal, a fugitive from mankind." Did every one so feel who, in order to travel on his own proper path had been obliged to leave the traditional highway?”

“The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.”

“Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.”

“The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.”

“To-day Massachusetts; and the whole of the American republic, from the border of Maine to the Pacific slopes, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, stand upon the immutable and everlasting principles of equal and exact justice. The days of unrequited labor are numbered with the past. Fugitive slave laws are only remembered as relics of that barbarism which John Wesley pronounced "the sum of all villainies," and whose knowledge of its blighting effects was matured by his travels in Georgia and the Carolinas.”

“Many of the finest and most interesting emotions perish forever, because too complex and fugitive for expression. Of all things relating to man, his feelings are perhaps the most evanescent, the greater part dying in the moment of their birth. But while emotions perish, thought blended in diction is immortal.”

“For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.”

“How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?”

“Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.”

“When I reflect upon what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have done, I can hardly persuade myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle and pleasure of the world had any reality; and I look on what has passed as one of those wild dreams which opium occasions, and I by no means wish to repeat the nauseous dose for the sake of the fugitive illusion.”

“I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive: he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores Across the lands and waters he was battered beneath the violence of the high ones for the savage Juno's unforgetting anger.”

“..if the Northern states refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A bargain can not be broken on one side, and still bind the other side.”