Little Brother Marcus Yallow Quotes

"I am so sick of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara and have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me away. At least I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then I'll have a little certainty in my life." (17.111)

[Marcus:] "Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It's just making people scared."

[Dad:] "They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of scumbags off the streets." (8.14-15)

[Marcus:] "Tell them that they can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someone they've known personally for a minimum of five years." (10.33)

[Marcus to Van] "Either you succeed or I ­­ or it's the end of Marcus Yallow. Maybe I'll get a new identity, but I don't think so. I think they'll catch me. I guess I've known all along that they'd catch me, some day." (20.140)

"Am I under arrest?" I repeated. They can't make you answer any questions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under arrest, they have to answer you. It's the rules.
"You're being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the woman snapped. (3.104-105)

"I want us to fight back," I said. "I want to stay free so that I can do that. If we go out there and blab, they're just say that we're kids, making it up. We don't even know where we were held! No one will believe us." (5.48)

[Marcus:] "You'd think Van, of all people, would understand." Half of Van's family lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had.

Jolu shrugged. "Maybe that's why she's so freaked out. Because she knows how dangerous it can get."

I knew what he was talking about. Two of Van's uncles had gone to jail and had never reappeared. (7.100-102)

[Marcus:] "You can't get anything done by doing nothing. It's our country. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free ­­ but we're not. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself." (20.102)

[Marcus:] "I decided that I couldn't run. That I had to face justice ­­ that my freedom wasn't worth anything if I was a wanted man, or if the city was still under the DHS. If my friends were still locked up. That freedom for me wasn't as important as a free country." (21.60)

Booger sighed a put­upon sigh. "Look, Marcus, we're on your side here. We use this system to catch bad guys. To catch terrorists and drug dealers. Maybe you're a drug dealer yourself. Pretty good way to get around the city, a Fast Pass. Anonymous."

"What's wrong with anonymous? It was good enough for Thomas Jefferson. And by the way, am I under arrest?"

"Let's take him home," Zit said. "We can talk to his parents."

"I think that's a great idea," I said. "I'm sure my parents will be anxious to hear how their tax dollars are being spent ­­"

I'd pushed it too far. (7.26-30)

"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Getting people pulled over is easy."

She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.

"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flash the firmware on a ten­dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock."

Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was so angry she couldn't speak. (8.34-37)

[Marcus:] "I'm going to do a video about this. Get it out over the weekend. Mondays are big days for viral video. Everyone'll be coming back from the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forward around school or the office." (Epilogue.18)