Based On A True Story Quotes

“To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...”
― David Videcette, The Theseus Paradox

“Your comfort zone is not that comfortable.”
― Onyi Anyado

“She was arriving at a revelation that the secret to living was simply forgetting”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Don't starve an instinct with a lie on,
Never hit or deceive a wounded lion.
He heals faster than you can imagine
And hurts even more when in famine.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot & Columbine

“Florence, listen to me carefully. He squeezed her hand. Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov

“Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser”
― Thomas P. Riggio, An American Tragedy

“Our communists aren’t like your communists. In New York they’re always on the street demonstrating, but their demands are absurd. Slash rents! Free groceries and electricity for the poor! They demand that landlords open up their vacant apartments to house the unemployed. They even demand that the Communist Party distribute unemployment relief instead of the Labor Department. They might as well demand cake and champagne!”
― Sana Krasikov

“Moscow appeared to her as an Asiatic sprawl of twisting streets, wooden shanties, and horse cabs. But already another Moscow was rising up through the chaos of the first. Streets built to accommodate donkey tracks have been torn open and replaced with boulevards broader than two or three Park Avenues. On the sidewalks, pedestrians were being detoured onto planks around enormous construction pits. A smell of sawdust and metal filings hung in the air”
― Sana Krasikov

“The Bolshevik leaders perched atop the Mausoleum were no easier to tell apart than chess pawns. But Florence too was certain that she could recognise the twinkling eyes of Joseph Stalin, which looked down at her each workday from the oil painting above Timofeyev’s desk”
― Sana Krasikov

“Sunset was just then settling over Red Square. There seemed some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his sombre dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“A Red Riding Hood out of her depths in the woods of socialism”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Who is she, after all? Not a member of the Party. Not even a Russian...What can she do, really, but watch the ginger-haired sacrificial lamb get slaughtered? One wrong move and Florence herself might be on the chopping block herself”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Just like a butterfly, I had sprung from my cocoon for the first time. For my risk, I was rewarded with Jacob Bennett." - Laylla Jonson (Beneath the Blossom Tree)”
― Laura Bailey, Beneath the Blossom Tree

“The immediate difficulty, Florence realised while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents, even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl. What choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence”
― Sana Krasikov

“Sergey described the mighty furnaces and plants rising up from the steppes. “How far we’ve come. How much work there is still to do!” She would have to see it herself one day, with her own eyes. Florence reread the last line with a turbulent flip in her stomach. Was this an invitation?”
― Sana Krasikov

“Florence imagined the Hammer and Sickle metallurgical plant to be an enormous brick factory like the ones in New York. But as she approached she saw it was in fact a small city of its own”
― Sana Krasikov

“Their courtship unfolded in two settings, a Russian reality overlaid with New York memories”
― Sana Krasikov

“From the moment Julian entered the world, Florence had begun to conceive of life as separate from the aspects of its outward circumstances. Over and over, life renewed itself. Over and over, it made itself blind to the death and destruction of the past”
― Sana Krasikov

“My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbours, to doing her washing by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Was it an instinct towards their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realising that they were about to fall off”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Only then, as she prepared to cross the avenue, did she again spot the man in the fedora hat. He was at the opposite side of the street from where he’d stood before, but the caramel color of his coat was unmistakable. He was loitering in front of what looked like a Ford V8 parked nose-up on the sidewalk. Florence adjusted her shawl over her shoulders and crossed to the opposite corner of the plaza. When she turned back to look again, he was gone”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence could feel a constriction in her chest…She had been foolish enough to hope that whatever she was walking into would affect no one but herself. Now the truth was catching up with her at the speed of her galloping heartbeat…Now they had summoned her. And they knew everything”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Florence, listen to me carefully.... Take whatever that agent offers you. Give him what he wants, and don’t ask too many questions. Get yourself an exit visa as soon as you can. Then leave! Disappear. Forget this wretched place”
― Sana Krasikov, The Patriots

“Oh God! Ray will kill me.” She ran into the bathroom, showered, and dressed.

“What will you tell your husband?” Jack asked when he kissed her in the doorway.

“That I was shopping.”

“Won’t he notice you’re not bringing anything home?”

She laughed. She dashed out the door, tired but satisfied. When Ray approached her that night, she grimaced, finding his advances almost unendurable.”
― Phillip B. Chute, Rock and Roll Murders: An Entrepreneur Finds That Murder is No Business Solution

“It was peaceful without Rock and Roll music pounding away in the background. For one of the few times in her life, Alice was at peace with herself. The bird flew away to the fountain below. Free as a bird, Alice thought. Suddenly something sour welled up inside her as she realized that she was back where she had started with Ray and the business. She cried, gently at first then sobbed; realizing she was a prisoner in King Ray’s castle again. She knew Ray would kill to keep her in his
dungeon. By returning, she was his property forever.”
― Phillip B. Chute, Rock and Roll Murders: An Entrepreneur Finds That Murder is No Business Solution

“It was peaceful without Rock and Roll music pounding away in the background. For one of the few times in her life, Alice was at peace with herself. The bird flew away to the fountain below. Free as a bird, Alice thought. Suddenly something sour welled up inside her as she realized that she was back where she had started with Ray and the business. She cried, gently at first then sobbed; realizing she was a prisoner in King Ray’s castle again. She knew Ray would kill to keep her in his dungeon. By returning, she was his property forever.”
― Phillip B. Chute, Rock and Roll Murders: An Entrepreneur Finds That Murder is No Business Solution

“Ray, like the person driving faster when the gas tank is near empty, was on a long trip to nowhere.”
― Phillip B. Chute, Rock and Roll Murders: An Entrepreneur Finds That Murder is No Business Solution

“There was a quiet period before the trial, similar to the deadening silence when birds know a raptor is in their midst. At first, the imminent trial was on the horizon; then it disappeared for more than a year.”
― Phillip B. Chute, Rock & Roll Murders