Scandal (TV Series)

No Sun on the Horizon (2014)

Scott Foley: Jake Ballard

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Jake Ballard : No family. That's the first rule No families, no connections. I never really had a family anyway. I'm more from this group of people related by blood. Indiana. Middle of nowhere. She really liked that TV channel where you call in and buy things - crap, you buy crap. Fake porcelain dolls, magic stain removers, big pictures of puppies wearing funny hats. He really liked drugs and sex with underage girls. I had a sister, so... she's dead now. She died. Anyway, not having a family makes you ripe, ready, a hunk of Clay waiting to be sculpted. No connections. No light at the end of the tunnel. No sun on the horizon. Nothing to wish for. They could burn the wonderland stamp on your brain, and no one would be the wiser, because there's no one there to miss you. You're now the property of the United States government, division B-613. You come to work at acme limited. You fake-sell fake paper, and you run the world in a way that no one even imagines exists in real life, and then little by little, you've been places, and you've done things, and there's been so much blood... This becomes your home. This becomes your family. And you can't imagine any other life.

• Jake Ballard : Every morning when I walk into my office in B-613, it's like I'm realizing all over again that I'm Command, and that it all falls on me. And the stuff that I'm in charge of, the decisions I have to make, the knowledge I have, the secrets I keep, I'm through the looking glass, and what's on the other side... Some days I really do want to be just the guy who sells paper.

  Olivia Pope : How did we end up here?

• Cyrus Beene : Let me fill in this paint-by-numbers picture for you, since you seem so unable. Sally Langston goes down for murder, and ma and pa kettle's hearts break, because how could the President not know that the First Lady and Chief of Staff covered it up using taxpayer money. But forget about the three of us going off to prison. Faith in government will be dead. People will stop paying their taxes. Economic systems, institutions that have lasted for centuries, will begin to falter while our enemies pounce on our crippled nation and hack away until the great American experiment is no more. Whatever issues I may have had with your predecessor, he would have taken care of this by now. No qualms, no questions, just action. I expect you to wisen up and do the same.

  Jake Ballard : You're a mouse, Cyrus. A mouse on a wheel, thinking, truly believing, that "if I just run a little bit faster, I'll finally get to the cheese."You're small. And while I'd love to explain to you how the world really works, I don't have the time, and you won't understand.

• [last lines] 

  Jake Ballard : There's been so much blood. This becomes your home. This becomes your family. And you can't imagine any other life.