2
" 4B, Sofia announced. Who lived here? Mrs. Sanchez, she was a very nice lady. She was nice? Yes. 4C. Who lived here. The Kleins. Were they nice? They were old. The apartment doors, once oak, were now all single slabs of siege-mentality sheet metal, their numbers, in his time screwed-in brass, nothing more than hardware-store decals. But he couldn’t care less about these particular outrages against memory, because in the end the information they provided was the same information as twenty years ago, and any way you cut it the doors and their numbers would always tell the same story. 4D. Who lived here? "
― Harry Brandt , The Whites
8
" His wife would never admit it to him, but Billy’s guess was that interns killed patients all the time, and their supervisors, with an eye for the long-term healer to come, mainly looked the other way. Well, it was the same with him. In order to get the greater job done, to mold your people as you saw fit and prepare them to effectively do the job in the years to come, you tolerated error, you turned a not-quite-blind eye to the actions of others and to your own actions. You created secrets and you kept secrets. Out on the streets, same thing: depending on the individual and the situation, sometimes you threw the Thor hammer at a misdemeanor, other times you let an individual walk who had no right to sleep in his own bed that night. You did all these things and more because as a boss, if you weren’t willing to play fast and loose when required, if you weren’t willing to make a discreet hash of the rule book now and then, on this job you might as well call in sick. That’s just the way it was. * "
― Harry Brandt , The Whites
12
" This was how the slow process of ending a fight always began for them, with a sullen agreement to tolerate each other’s presence while engaged in a nonverbal activity, during which, at some point, one of them would make a not-quite-spontaneous comment about something unrelated to the argument, something safe, delivered in an offhand monotone, that didn’t require a response but usually got one, also to be delivered in the same flatline tone. From there, the exchanges, always off the subject of the fight, would gradually begin to pick up speed until they were actually talking and that monotone was replaced by the natural oscilloscope of unself-conscious human speech. Formal apologies, if the situation really demanded it, usually came later in another room or, if they could get away with it, never, neither of them wanting to risk another potentially volatile encounter if it wasn’t necessary. "
― Harry Brandt , The Whites
16
" You know, you read the papers after a young man dies in this city, someone's always saying, 'He was just starting to get his life together, he was just talking about going back to school, getting his GED, getting job, talking about being a real father to his daughter, talking about getting away from the hood, about enlisting, about marrying his fiancée, he was just about to do this, to do that...' All these 'just's, whether they were true or not, because they all died young and 'just' was all they had, tomorrow was all they had. And the same could be said for my boy. He was 'just' about to finish his schooling, he was 'just' about to find his own way in the world, 'just' about to show me the man that now, now, he'll never get to be, the man that over the years would have null-and-voided every hardship, every heartache I've ever endured in my life. "
― Harry Brandt , The Whites
19
" There’s some people in this room right now,” Pavlicek said, “who gave twenty years or more to the Job, myself included. We’ve seen it all, handled it all, and when a young person dies we’ve all walked up the stairs, knocked on the doors, and delivered the news, between us, to an army of parents. We’ve caught them on their way to the floor, carried them into the bedroom or living room, then gone into their kitchens and brought them water—over the years, an ocean of water, glass by glass by glass. And so, after all that, we think we understand what it must feel like to be one of those parents, but we don’t. We can’t. I still can’t. But I’m getting there. "
― Harry Brandt , The Whites
