“After millions of years of evolution, we start stupid cults of celebrity and feed the egos of maniacs until they take our money, fuck us in the arse, and then cut our throats. We should be cutting their throats!”
“What I am I wished to be, and what I wished to be I am.”
“...there is something demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering.”
“Skeptizismus ist das Privileg derjenigen, die nicht betroffen sind.”
“The destruction of Dan's Star Wars collectibles would have been mourned with more intensity by their owner than the burning of the library at Alexandria.”
“Mobile phones ... they're not for communicating, they're for broadcasting. Broadcasting The Show Of Me.”
“But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history...”
“These great historical figures we admire for their conquests, their drive, their ambition, and the progress they are said to have been responsible for. But would we have not been better off as a species without them?”
“And I extend this to so many of our corporate leaders. I ask you to draw your eye down to our glorious professional leaders in the commercial arena, in this most material of ages. How many of them should be in charge of anything, let alone other people?”
“I believe the vulpine greed of the corporate world is cut from the very same cloth as the tyrant of history.”
“Es hätte alles so schön sein können. Ein bisschen billige Psychotherapie, angereichert mit mittelalterlichen Ideen von Askese und Frömmigkeit. Ein Leben ohne falschen Stolz und Egoismus. Das jedenfalls waren die ursprünglichen Ideale. Alles eingehüllt in allerlei Mystizismus, damit es toll aussah.”
“A day of fiscal reckoning was nigh.”
“He had been committed, absorbed and unthinking. Intentionally, because the story was so good. So good he felt like he’d been damaged by it, permanently.”
“You said parachute. You think we're going to parachute out of here?"
"Yep."
"I don't think so."
"Ah, come on. Tigers aren't afraid of heights, are they?"
"This isn't about heights. This is about being extremely high up in a tree and hurtling out bodies into oblivion based on a strange fabric that you now claim is a parachute.”
“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”
“I don't know. Maybe we're all chaos theorists. Lovers of pattern and predictability, we're scared shitless of explosive change. But we're fascinated by it, too. Drawn to it. Travelers tap their brakes to ogle the mutilation and mangled metal on the side of the interstate, and the traffic backs up for miles. Hijacked planes crash into skyscrapers, breached levees drown a city, and CNN and the networks rush to the scene so that we can all sit in front of our TVs and feast on the footage. Stare, stunned, at the pandemonium--the devils let loose from their cages.”
“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.”
“He knew what it was like to love one who did not--or could not--love you back. But he'd had no choice. None of them did.”
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