The Inner Circle Quotes
"There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I love those stories."
"The best way to avoid being surprised is to be prepared."
"There’s nothing more powerful than history, which is the one thing I have with this woman."
"You need to get outta your head and outta your comfort zone."
"Remember this elevator next time you’re on the slow line."
"Only the good things matter after ten years."
"Exitus Acta Probat - The outcome justifies the deed."
"In life, there’s the way you act when you know people are watching. And then there’s the way you act when no one’s watching, which is the real you."
"I’m not sure it feels good. Maybe it’s good. It’s hard to tell after Iris. But it feels like someone clawed away a thick spiderweb from my memory."
"You really should just go for my boobs. At least you get a better view."
"There’s only one person ever who went up against a sitting President and walked away the same way they walked in."
"I can’t help but picture that look when Clementine first arrived yesterday—that self-assured warmth that she wears as coolly and comfortably as her thumb rings and nose piercing."
"The biggest threat to Clementine’s well-being isn’t from who her father is. It’s from the fact that, like me, she’s on that videotape from when we were in the SCIF."
"But it’s mine. The first big thing I bought after nearly a hundred weddings, plus two years of working my eBay side business and saving my government salary."
"To anyone else, it’s clutter. To me, it’s how the world used to communicate: through postcards."
"But today, those real photo postcards are among the most collected items on eBay, as I learned when I sold a photo from a 1912 Stanford football game for a whopping $2.35."
"The cards have oddly helped me settle back into my groove and find my sea legs."
"I start every morning with the obituaries. Mostly, I read about strangers."
"The worst part is, I don’t know if that’s good or bad."
"There’s a reason that book just happened to be in that room, which just happened to be used by the leader of the free world."
"But at seventy-two years old, he’s not rolling them down manually."
"This girl’s been back in your life barely forty-eight hours, and what—suddenly you don’t want to eat your raisin bran, or listen to the same boring old music anymore?"
"I saw the call log. President called you at three in the morning?"
"There were faster ways for Dr. Stewart Palmiotti to get to work."
"If you don’t change the way you’re living, that’s gonna be you one day. Old and lovely and all by yourself."
"If it were, the paramedics would be carrying you under the sheet by now."
"We’re the caretakers of those sheets of paper that’ll someday define the writing of history."
"You may not know if it was hidden by the President, or for the President, or by or for his Secret Service agents or some other party we don’t even know of—but the act of hiding and finding something, that’s a two-party agreement."
"The President stepped off the elevator and glanced around instead of locking on his aides."
"Not every President is a master of one thing: eye contact."
"I think about hiding it in my briefcase, but if I do that, I risk security here rummaging through it."
"If this book is as important as we think it is—if Orlando really died for it—I need to keep it close."
"The cold has definitely eased up, but a pitiless chill climbs my spine."
"C’mon in—only about half our patients bite."
"They keep the doors unlocked so that the patients feel they have more freedom."
"Cleaning out the tater patch—that’s what Laurent’s grandfather used to call cleaning the hair on the neck."
"In Washington, D.C., when it all went sour, the only person you could really count on was yourself."
"You know him, don’t you? You brought him here."
"The only feeling more painful than loss is the feeling of guilt."
"26 YEARS IS A LONG TIME TO KEEP A SECRET."
"His focus was accuracy. Precision. Giving the client exactly what he wanted. Or at the very least, convincing the client that whatever he gave them was exactly what they wanted."
"But no one ever suspects someone sneaking something in."
"You can’t win this. No one can win this. No one wins against a President."
"The words faded back to nothingness as the archivist slapped the book shut and headed through the lobby, out into the cold of Pennsylvania Avenue."
"That’s how you know you’re alive, Beecher. Welcome to the present."
"Every once in a while, there’s kind of a… speed bump."
"Absolute power doesn’t corrupt absolutely—but it will make you do what you swore you’d never do, especially when you’re trying to hold on to it."
"It was reserved solely for those who wronged her family. It was a lesson Palmiotti never forgot."
"All cities have old money. Washington, D.C., has old money. But it also has old power."
"Welcome to Oak Hill Cemetery, the wooden sign read just inside the wrought-iron gate."
"This was where they were going wrong. He had told the President just that."
"With a flick of his thumb, Palmiotti opened the base of the rock, slid the note inside, and buried the rock back in the snow."
"To get this far, to climb this high, you had to be capable of a great many things."
"Just an honor, Mr. President," an older man with a graying goatee offered.
"The President doesn’t bite. Unless he’s pissed."
"As always, he’s trying to keep me cornered."
"There was also something to be said about the greater good."
"I made the card. So people don’t sit here," Nico says.
"There was a real power that came with being faithful."
"Sometimes good people don’t know how to be good to themselves."
"If he’s sending a message, it has to be a subtle one."
"I know this moment. It’s just like the moment in the original SCIF: a scary door, an off-limits room, and a spectacularly clear opportunity."
"Clenching my jaw, I give the door a slight push, and the whiff of rosewater perfume takes me back a dozen years."
"You say that. But then every year or so, we still get one of you showing up, hoping to get an autograph or grab some personal item."
"Nippy out today, huh? 'I’m from Wisconsin. This is summer for us,' I say."
"I didn’t realize you had a full medical unit back here."
"The thing is, right now, I need what’s in those woods."
"Our population’s aging. We need someplace to take care of them."
"State champs," I say with a nod, well aware that there’s only one thing I really care about from high school.
"You should put that in one of your articles, rather than all the usual stuff you write about us."
"I was visiting with him earlier. Doing research. I think I left my notebook."
"He’s doing his janitor work in the RMB Building. You wanna ask him something, go find him there."
"The redbrick building, right? I know exactly where it is."
"Don’t let him confuse you," Clementine says.
"Tell him!" Clementine growls, her hand suddenly steady as her finger tightens around the trigger.
She asked for a file," Dallas finally says. "She wanted Nico’s army file.
"He didn’t leave the army. They kicked him out—for trying to use a staple remover to take out one of his superiors’ eyes," Dallas says.
"No—they kicked him out because of what they put inside him… what they turned him into," Clementine shoots back.
"My mother—before she died—she told me, okay."
You can look for yourself," she adds. "Ask them for the records, okay!
"Beecher, do you know what kind of cancer they found in me?" Clementine asks.
"Every doctor… every specialist… they said there're over one hundred and fifty types of cancer in the world, but when they look at mine, they can’t even classify it."
"You think he’s stupid!? Your Plumbers caused this!" Clementine yells.
"I’m not in the Plumbers—I’m in the Culper Ring! I’m one of the good guys!" Dallas insists.
"I did everything Clementine and Tot and even Dallas had been pushing me to do."
Clementine, what you told me before… about being sick," I say. "Are you really dying?
"You lie. And worst of all, you lie to yourself," she tells me.
"Beecher, you keep thinking I’m trying to fight you. But you need to know—all this time—we thought you were the one who was blackmailing us." - President Wallace
"You’re not a jackass like everyone else," Clementine said.
"You’re serious? This is real?" - Beecher, on being asked to join the Culper Ring.
"Some days you get peanuts; some days you get shells. This is a peanut day." - Tot
"Now that we finally got you in the Culper Ring, well… don’t you want to meet the others?" - Tot