File Quotes

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk. ~ Mark Helprin

The day will never come when any Palestinian would be arrested because of his political affiliation or because of resisting the occupation. The file of political detention must be closed. ~ Said Seyam

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Last semester was intense," I said to Dad.

"Intense?" he echoed, picking up my file. "Let's see. On your first day at Hecate, you were attacked by a werewolf. You insulted a teacher, which resulted in semester-long cellar duty with one Archer Cross. According to the notes, the two of you became 'close.' Apparently close enough for you to see the mark of L'Occhio di Dio on his chest.

I flushed at that, and felt Mom's arm tighten around me. Over the past six months, I'd filled her in on a lot of the story with Archer, but not all of it.

Specifically, the whole me-making-out-in-the-cellar-with-a-murderous-warlock-working-with-the-Eye-part. ~ Rachel Hawkins

By all means, stay," Anne said. "Have a seat. We'll take care of you next."
"Yeah, see, I think someone else is going to be on trial next." Baring my teeth at her in a grin I pulled out my file folder. "I've got some interesting reading here. And I even brought copies for everyone so you don't have to share."
A distinguished-looking South American man on the end shook his head. "What is this? Another farce?"
"No, but bonus points for using a funny word. You really want to read what I have here. Anne, you'll be especially interested, since you have a starring role."
"Enough. Rhia - "
Reth quickly flicked his wrist at her; her mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. It was one of the most satisfying things I'd ever seen. Sure, that trick had sucked when he used it on me, but I wholly approved of it now. ~ Kiersten White

Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result. ~ John Quiggin

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to ~ David Graeber

Sanchez got the phone call, listened carefully, glanced over at Spencer, in Whittaker's office, having his morning coffee. Hung up the phone, got up, went and knocked on the door, asked if he could see Spencer a moment, and lowering his voice said, "Carl downstairs just called me because someone wants to file a vagrancy report.
Spencer slapped him on the back. "Detective Sanchez, thank you for bringing the particulars of your job description to my attention. Well done. Go to it.
Sanchez hemmed and said, "The young woman says she is Lily Quinn. Specifically asked for me, Carl says.
Spencer didn't slap him on the back this time. He stared at Carl and then said, "All right smart-ass, go back to you desk.
"That's what I thought," said Sanchez. ~ Paullina Simons

hear him laughing. Perhaps this was the moment to mention Vasili Yenkov. He opened his desk drawer and took out Yenkov's KGB file. He picked up a folder of documents for Khrushchev to sign, then he hesitated. He was ~ Ken Follett

I always knew you had good taste, Mia. You should go talk to him." "I should go talk to him. I should also file my taxes on time, remember to floss regularly, and inherit seven million dollars. But I won't. Ever. ~ Sara Wolf

I've noticed in myself that if something small and ultimately meaningless has gone wrong - I can't find the file I left on top of my desk, my daughter failed to do what I asked her to do before going to a friend's house - I can easily get rattled. But if someone calls to inform me of a serious difficulty - someone has been in an accident, or a child is in trouble - I notice a profound stillness come over me as I focus on the problem. In the former case, my temptation to become frantic does not attract solutions, but rather hinders them. There is nothing in my personal energy that invites help from others, nor do I have the clarity to think through what I need to do next. ~ Marianne Williamson

I couldn't keep my eyes off of her when she was leaning over to open a file drawer. I'd purposely moved all of the expense files to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in my office for that very reason. ~ Andrea Smith

Nurturing words show that you believe in the other party's capacity to learn, change and grow. One's mind is like a computer. Every message you send goes into one of two files: discounting or nurturing. The file with the most data will direct how one sees and feels about himself or herself. Messages that nurture are based on unconditional love which must be worked at, especially if you come from a discounting family. You will need to rely on Jesus to fill the void in your life with His presence and help you learn how to love unconditionall like He loves us. ~ H. Norman Wright

Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses - certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The documentary we are working on is about my mother, Bev Umehara, for whom our film company, Bev's Girl Films, is named after. It is a passion project that I have wanted to make since her unexpected passing in 1999. The film is about my mother's calling which came late in life, at 47, when she made the sudden transformation from a humble hardworking secretary and mother of four, into a labor activist, a respected union leader, and a role model for rank-and-file workers, women of color, and for all Asian Pacific Americans. ~ Garth Kravits

There is no right way to knit; there is no wrong way to knit. So if anybody kindly tells you that what you are doing is "wrong," don't take umbrage; they mean well. Smile submissively, and listen, keeping your disagreement on an entirely mental level. They may be right, in this particular case, and even if not, they may drop off pieces of information which will come in very handy if you file them away carefully in your brain for future reference. ~ Elizabeth Zimmermann

Eric Steele was strapped in and rubbing a rag over his father's 1911. Demo had brought the pistol with the rest of Steele's
gear on board the C-17. In the cockpit, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, shoving Steele back in his seat. He barely
noticed because he was thinking about the first time his father let him hold the pistol. It had felt so heavy in his hands
back then.


So much I never got to ask him.

He ran his thumb over the spot where the serial number should have been. It was silver and all traces of the file marks were
smoothed out by years of use. The pistol was one of John Moses Browning's masterpieces, the same design that the American
infantryman had carried in the Battle of Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Korea, and Vietnam. It was the only thing he had to remind
him of the father he never really knew.


Steele had made the pistol his own by modifying it to shoot 9mm, adding a threaded barrel, and installing suppressor sights,
which were taller than the factory ones. It was his gun now, and he slipped it away before taking an amphetamine tablet out
of his pocket and downing it with a sip of water. ~ Sean Parnell

Indeed, the zeal of Boston's rank-and-file marathoners rivaled, and in some ways echoed, the religious passion of Nathaniel Howe and his congregation. The runners indulged in orgies of self-denial-running 100 miles a week, working junk )ohs in order to have time to train, paying their own way to races, banding together in ascetic cells, forgoing the temptations of an idolatrous world in order to attain grace and salvation out on the road. As in Puritan New England, grace was not blithely attained. A believer-a runner-earned it by losing toenails and training down to bone and muscle, just as the Puritans formed calluses on their knees from
praying. No one made a cent from their strenuous efforts. The running life, like the spiritual life, was its own reward. ~ John Brant

I love lists. Always have. when I was 14, I wrote down every dirty word I knew on file cards and placed them in alphabetical order. I have a thing about about collections, and a list is a collection with purchase. (Wired Magazine, "Step One: Make a List", October 2012) ~ Adam Savage

We need to simplify our tax code. We need to make sure that it's not too cumbersome for people to be able to comply with. And that they don't end up spending more money trying to file their taxes than they do actually paying in. ~ Kristi Noem

The kind of true-life writing that is fun to read - that makes an ally of the reader - is the kind that you are so nervous about putting down on paper that you lock the Word file with a secret password and encrypt it - and all of it. ~ Julie Klausner

The 3.5 billion unreached people on earth would form a single file line that would stretch around the equator 25 times! Can you picture 25 lines of Christless people, trampling endlessly toward hell? Let that vision stay with you day and night. ~ Larry Stockstill

I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall's chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, 'You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson's objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments …. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.'

Who knows what happened to that particular chair. … But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair. ~ Sarah Vowell

Donald Trump threatened to file a defamation suit against me for running a TV ad that consisted only entirely of his own words on national television. Now, that's really a remarkable theory, that it is defamation to show people what he said on national TV. I think the voters are smarter than that. ~ Ted Cruz

The part that the public sees is the arguments up at the podium and the briefs that we file. But a significant part of the job - in fact, I'd say I spend more of my time on this part of the job, which is deciding what the position of the United States will be in the cases that we're going to be participating in before the court. ~ Donald Verrilli Jr.

Where's my tax form? Where's the file that's supposed to hold my W-2 form and interest statement? Where's the mileage log I specifically asked be kept last year?? Where's the monthly check summary? And who's been stuffing Visa receipts in the aluminum foil drawer??!! How embarrassing. I'm surrounded by idiots and I'm the only one in the office. ~ Cathy Guisewite

I will fucking ruin you, do you hear me? You are nothing! Nothing!

I sighed, tired of his irrelevant presence. "Yeah, yeah. I'll be sure to file that info right between fuck this and fuck that. ~ Penny Reid

A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it. ~ David Wroblewski

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it. ~ Stephen King

My job is to file things! I'm not going to be like, "Mr. Jacobsen from Oakland, California" - just listing his problems, like a rap. ~ Tamaryn

Why would Grant password-protect this one file?"
"To frustrate his daughter and her best friend to no end?"
"Good guess, but probably not. ~ Hilary Duff

Jerry thought about what a letter of recommendation from a council of wizards would look like in his resume file.
"Totally secret," he said firmly. ~ Rick Cook

To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

Another lesson to file away about Scotland: insulting other people in a childish manner was the national pastime. ~ Molly Ringle

Maybe the heart is like an expandable file, filling to accommodate everything you need to carry with you. ~ Michael Baron

I actually think there are more Republicans than people realize who would be sympathetic to immigration reform in the rank and file. I think the lesson for Jeb Bush is politicians shouldn't write books with long lead times. ~ E. J. Dionne

If operating in a network environment, do not place public domain or shareware programs in a common file-server directory that could be accessible to any other PC on the network. ~ John McAfee

The truth that I am seeking is in your missing file. ~ Bob Dylan

My hands clench at my sides. I cannot adequately express how tickled I am to know that I wasted four years pursuing a business degree at Oregon State so I could scan and file papers while my incompetent twenty-four-year-old boss supervises. ~ Winter Renshaw

If you have a debt issue or credit card issue, start dealing with it. If you have a tax issue, don't just say, 'I'm not going to file.' There are ways to deal with these things, but you must communicate with your creditors, whether it's a credit card company or tax department. ~ Hill Harper

Some of the ideas were silly, thanks to Molly, who, despite being upset with Jones, was still trying to keep the mood upbeat.
They had boxes and boxes of copy paper. They could make thousands of paper airplanes with the message, "Help!" written on them and fly them out the windows.
Could they try to blast their way out of the tunnel? Maybe dig an alternative route to the surface? It seemed like a long shot, worth going back in there and taking a look at the construction - which Jones had done only to come back out, thumbs down.
Two of them could create a diversion, while the other to took the Impala and crashed their way out of the garage.
At which point the Impala - and everyone in it - would be hit by hundreds of bullets.
That one - along with taking their chances with the far fewer number of soldiers lying in wait at the end of the escape tunnel - went into the bad idea file.
Molly had thought that they could sing karaoke. Emilio had a Best of Whitney Houston karaoke CD. Their renditions of I Will Always Love you, she insisted, would cause the troops to break rank and run away screaming.
Except the karaoke machine was powered by electricity, which they were trying to use only for the computer and the security monitors, considering - at the time - that the generator was almost out of gasoline.
Yeah, that was why it was a silly idea.
It did, however, generate a lot of desperately needed laughter. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Not all roots are buried down in the ground, some are at the top of a tree. ~ Jinvirle

It's very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak. ~ Charlie Munger

But music didn't make my mother nervous. She was more concerned about the agenda of women who thought it was a good idea to wear pastel, shoulder-padded suits while they all marched single file toward a better tomorrow. ~ Wayne Gladstone

Damn! - I'd rather walk into something of my own accord than to be frogmarched into it."
"So it says here in the file. James Mowry, twenty-six, restless and pigheaded. Can be trusted to do anything at all - provided the alternative is worse."
"You sound like my father. Did he tell you that?"
"The Service does not reveal its sources of information. ~ Eric Frank Russell

It's not real. Love is a product of habit and routine. If you break that habit and change those routines, the person you've loved and lost and can't live without suddenly becomes an easy memory to file in the back of your mind . In other words, love isn't a heart condition. It's not even an emotional one. It's just a four-letter word we use when we want to control someone else and ruin their life if we ever decide to walk out on them ~ Morgan Parker

Judi Bari did something that I believe is unparalleled in the history of the environmental movement. She is an Earth First! activist who took it upon herself to organize Georgia Pacific sawmill workers into the IWW ... Well guess what friends, environmentalists and rank and file timber workers becoming allies is the most dangerous thing in the world to the timber industry! ~ Darryl Cherney

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are 'clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed. ~ William Shakespeare

I can't belly dance.'
Yes, you can. It's in your fi
'
Will you stop reading my goddamn file! ~ Jennifer Rardin

We could file for divorce immediately? Today?" "You could. That is, if it's still what you want to do." Will ~ Leta Blake

E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last
cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How
in the World Are We Going to Escape? ~ Lemony Snicket

After our interviews we examined whether this spoke to a larger trend. In 1932 a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania named James Bossard looked through five thousand consecutive marriage licenses on file for people who lived in the city of Philadelphia. Whoa: One-third of the couples who got married had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they got married. One out of six had lived within the same block. Most amazingly, one of every eight married couples had lived in the same building before they got married. ~ Aziz Ansari

I read the letter once, put it aside, and read it again; I pick up a file but am really only reading your letter; I am with the typist, to whom I am supposed to dictate, and again your letter slowly slides through my fingers and I have begun to draw it out of my pocket when people ask me something and I know perfectly well I should not be thinking of your letter now, yet that thought is all that occurs to me - but after all that I am as hungry as before, as restless as before, and once again the door starts swinging merrily, as though the man with the letter were about to appear again. That is what you call the "little pleasure" your letters give me. ~ Franz Kafka

They often got my file mixed up and thought that I had gone to juvenile detention for being a prostitute. All I had done was date a pimp. ~ Heather O'Neill

We have written a draft of the script in every calendar year since [2010]. Quite honestly. Our Deadpool file is ... full, to capacity. ~ Paul Wernick

You will make mistakes. I promise. Get used to that idea. Don't think of them as mistakes. Just file them away as methods that didn't work. Learn your lesson and move on. -- from Homegrown and Handmade ~ Deborah Niemann

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image. ~ John Dykstra

I like files. I like editing a CSS file without necessarily having to edit an HTML file. I like fixing a problem by replacing a corrupted file with a clean one. Maybe I'm set in my ways, but I don't consider it a hardship to open a folder or replace a file. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

I'd title them and file them away as this or that. Everything they did was then filtered through that title, whether it was accurate or not. ~ Donna Augustine

For example, I keep all my actual writing in the Manuscript section divided by chapter, and then, in the research section, I have folders for Setting, Characters, and Plot with a separate area for my cuts file (where I put big blocks of text that I've cut out of the story but can't bring myself to delete yet) and my writing worksheet, which is the table I use to keep track of my word counts. ~ Rachel Aaron

I understand Windows as well as most technical-support personnel. I can edit a config.sys file and delete bad lines in an autoexec.bat with the best of them. I can partition a hard drive in FAT32
But why would I want to? ~ Douglas Rushkoff

A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic. ~ George MacDonald

Beside himself with shame and despair, the utterly ruined though perfectly just Mr. Golyadkin dashed headlong away, wherever fate might lead him; but with every step he took, with every thud of his foot on the granite of the pavement, there leapt up as though out of the earth a Mr. Golyadkin precisely the same, perfectly alike, and of a revolting depravity of heart. And all these precisely similar Golyadkins set to running after one another as soon as they appeared, and stretched in a long chain like a file of geese, hobbling after the real Mr. Golyadkin, so there was nowhere to escape from these duplicates - so that Mr. Golyadkin, who was in every way deserving of compassion, was breathless with terror; so that at last a terrible multitude of duplicates had sprung into being; so that the whole town was obstructed at last by duplicate Golyadkins, and the police officer, seeing such a breach of decorum, was obliged to seize all these duplicates by the collar and to put them into the watch-house, which happened to be beside him . . . Numb and chill with horror, our hero woke up, and numb and chill with horror felt that his waking state was hardly more cheerful . . . It was oppressive and harrowing . . . He was overcome by such anguish that it seemed as though some one were gnawing at his heart. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Linda grabbed an ashtray from the table and threw it at him, hitting him right above the eyebrow. Blood ran down his face and dripped on Harriet Bolson's file. ~ Henning Mankell

I read round the subject, I make a skeleton outline, and then I start work in the relevant archives. During the marshaling of the material, I copy the material from each archive file across to the relevant chapter in the skeleton outline. ~ Antony Beevor

Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there. ~ E. M. Forster

One of the most sublime and hazardous moments in human experience comes when two people lock eyes and realize that they are sexually attracted to one another. They may not act on the knowledge.
They may file it away for future reference. They may deny it. They may never see each other again. But the moment has happened, and for an instant all other considerations are insignificant. ~ Roger Ebert

A Scott, having got his bride pregnant, was apt to file her as completed business for eight months at a time. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, 'memex' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory. ~ Vannevar Bush

In the army of indigence the uniform is rags; they serve to distinguish the rank and file from the recruiting officers. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I find rap, dance, and hip-hop vaguely terrifying. I don't have the right clothes to be into them, and it all seems a bit intense. I file these genres along with heavy metal and speed metal under people who would kill, then eat me. ~ Caitlin Moran

Don't you let them forget about you, she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe. ~ Janet Fitch

When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we're finally starting to get somewhere. It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together. When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it's down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is "Wow," that's a prayer. ~ Anne Lamott

But that's why you pay for insurance, right? If you never file a claim, then they've beaten you. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Local prosecutors work alongside local police officers on a regular basis and are therefore conflicted when it comes to prosecuting those same officers. They are under extreme pressure from local police unions and from rank-and-file cops. ~ Al Sharpton

It's the thing I struggle with every day: the mental diligence and stamina needed to sit in front of the computer, open the file, start writing and to keep doing so, word after word, until I've created the next story. A combination of learning disability and chronic health issues make that the hardest thing for me. ~ Nalo Hopkinson

When one is in office one has no idea how damnable things can feel to the ordinary rank and file of the public. ~ Winston Churchill

There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.
I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.
The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life--every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale--and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. ~ Derrick Jensen

[N]o one has more power in the criminal justice system that prosecutors. Few rules constrain the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all, regardless of the strength of the evidence. The prosecutor is also free to file more charges against the defendepant the can realistically be proven in court, so long as probable cause arguable exists. Whether a good plea deal is offered to a defendant is entirely up to the prosecutor. And if the mood strikes, the prosecutor can transfer drug defendants to the federal system, where penalties are far more severe. Juveniles, for their part, cam be transferred to adult court, where they can be sent to adult prison. ~ Michelle Alexander

Neil stared back at him, suddenly lost. He was fluent in two languages, nearly there in a third, and could string together some useful survival phrases in a half-dozen more. But with the whole truth bared between them Neil didn't have the right words to say. "You should have thrown my file away," Neil said at last. "You should have walked away when I threw your contract back in your face. But you took a chance on me and you brought me here. You saved my life. Three times," Neil said, "you've saved my life. I can't just say 'thank you' for that."
"You don't have to," Wymack said. "I brought you here, but you saved yourself. You're the one who decided to stay. You're the one who stopped being afraid long enough to realize you could get a grip here and a foothold there. You found your own way."
"If anything," Wymack continued when Neil tried to protest, "I should be thanking you. You told us last night you intended to end the year dead or in federal custody. You could have shut everyone and everything out and worried about yourself this year. Instead you agreed to help Dan fix this team. You're saving the two I thought we couldn't reach, and you're a living example for Kevin to follow. He never used to watch you," Wymack said, "but he's had eyes on you since December trying to figure out how you stand your ground. ~ Nora Sakavic

Can you tell me which is yours?" Standing at Bird's side, the nurse spoke as if she were addressing the father of the hospital's healthiest and most beautiful baby. But she wasn't smiling, she didn't even seem sympathetic; Bird decided this must be the standard intensive care ward quiz. Not only the nurse who had asked the question but two young nurses who were rinsing baby bottles beneath a huge water heater on the far wall, and the older nurse measuring powdered milk next to them, and the doctor studying file cards at a cramped desk against the smudgy poster-cluttered wall, and the doctor on this side of him, conversing with a stubby little man who seemed, like Bird, to be the father of one of the seeds of calamity gathered here - everybody in the room stopped what he was doing and turned in expectant silence to look at Bird. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

Well, all across the country, this is kind of sad, unemployment offices are swamped with people waiting to file for unemployment insurance. It's gotten so bad that the offices are overwhelmed and can't function. I got an idea. Why don't you hire more people? They're right there in line. Speed this whole thing up! ~ Jay Leno

When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they "share" the file. ~ Anonymous

Do you recall telling Dr. Phillips during your appointment on February second of last year that you needed to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases because - let me make sure I get this correct here . . ."
Taylor read out loud from her file,

"Because, quote, 'your weasel-dick husband slept with a skanky whore stripper and the cheating bastard didn't use a rubber'?"

Ms. Campbell shot up in her chair. "She actually wrote that down?"

The jury tittered with amused laughter and sat up interestedly. Finally - things were starting to look a little more like Law & Order around here.

"I take it that's a yes?" Taylor asked. ~ Julie James

There were no walls. No stupid file cabinets, Nothing between me and everything I felt. Nothing between me and all that Zayne was.
Which was more.
So much more. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Grandma Harken was sharpening her garden shears. Her hands slowed on the file and she said finally, "He'll get in trouble and he'll figure it out. Best to do it without us standing over him. It's the only way anybody ever learns to clean up after themselves. ~ Ursula Vernon

An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name. ~ Jef Raskin

Did I need medication? Or did I need someone to talk to? Someone, that is, who would do more than charge the going rate for nodding and whip out a prescription pad before the first fifty minutes were up. Was I physiologically depressed? At an innate biochemical disadvantage? Or was reaching for the pad just the way things were done because the doc had been well patronized by the drug reps and had plenty of samples in her file cabinet? ~ Norah Vincent

Hmmm," he said, "Lauren Elizabeth Danner.Elizabeth is a beautiful name and so is Lauren. They suit you."
Unable to endure the sweet torment of having him flirt with her, Lauren said repressively, "I was named after two maiden aunts.One of them had a squint and the other had warts."
Nick ignored that and continued aloud. "Color of eyes,blue." He regarded her over the top of the file, his gray eyes intimate and teasing. "They are definitely blue.A man could lose himself in those eyes of yours-they're gorgeous."
"My right eye used to wobble unless I wore my glasses," Lauren informed him blithely. "They had to operate on it."
"A little girl with wobbly blue eyes and glasses on her nose," he reflected with a slow grin. "I'll bet you were cute."
"I looked studious,not cute. ~ Judith McNaught

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another
except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work
one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for. ~ Charles De Lint

I have a file of four million jokes ... I have them cross-indexed. Whatever subject you want, I have a joke on it. ~ Milton Berle

One of the fans had a poster that said, 'I'm a Peeta-file. That was probably the best one. ~ Josh Hutcherson

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins as two. Let us pretend to lie here among the sugar-cane and watch them as they steal by in single file, each with his hand on his dagger. ~ J.M. Barrie

No matter what documents you investigate, and what objects you retrieve, you many never answer the questions that are most important to you, but nevertheless, sooner or later you must finish whatever file you have begun. ~ Lemony Snicket

Nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent, their pitiful results, the enhanced appeal of movements after the defeat of Nazism, and the obvious threat of Bolshevism to national independence. The result of all efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political situation in which the destructive movements are the only "parties" that function properly. Their leadership has maintained authority under the most trying circumstances and in spite of constantly changing party lines. In order to gauge correctly the chances for survival of the European nation-state, it would be wise not to pay too much attention to nationalist slogans which the movements occasionally adopt for purposes of hiding their true intentions, but rather to consider that by now everybody knows that they are regional branches of international organizations, that the rank and file is not disturbed in the least when it becomes obvious that their policy serves foreign-policy interests of another and even hostile power, and that denunciations of their leader as fifth columnists, traitors to the country, etc., do not impress their members to any considerable degree. In contrast to the old parties, the movements have survived the last war and are today the only "parties" which have remained alive and meaningful to their adherents. ~ Hannah Arendt

[B]ut once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That's when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match. ~ Louise Erdrich

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one. ~ Angela Carter

People aren't going to support an artist just because they have an audio file. They have to feel a real connection. ~ Chuck D

People can be cruel,' he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you. ~ Matthew Quick