“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“I just read them for fun."
"Dictionaries?"
"Yes."
"That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful."
"Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary."
He blinked.
"See?" She said. "Fun.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“I don't think you've been in love. Not recently, anyway. I'm not sure you remember what it's like. It compromises you. It takes over your body. Like a bareword. I think love is a bareword.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Everyone's broken, one way or another.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“ 'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.' ”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“All empires fall, eventually.”
“But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.[”]”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyze what you’re hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you’ve got nothing. You’ve delegated the ability to make up your mind.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Stop believing what you want to believe. It’s unbecoming”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Words aren’t just sounds or shapes. They’re meaning. That’s what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“She didn't really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn't fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“He kissed her, because fuck it, he was probably about to die.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“ Your site isn't static. It's dynamically generated. Do you know what that means ?"
"No."
"It means the site looks different to different people. Let's say you chose the poll option that said you're in favor of tax cuts. Well there's a cookie on your machine now, and when you look at the site again, the articles are about how the government is wasting your money. The site is dynamically selecting content based on what you want. I mean, not what you want. What will piss you off. What will engage your attention and reinforce your beliefs, make you trust the site. And if you said you were against tax cuts, we'll show you stories of Republicans blocking social programs or whatever. It works every which way. Your site is made of mirrors, reflecting everyone's thoughts back at them..."
"And we haven't even started talking about keywords. This is just the beginning. Third major advantage: People who use a site like this tend to ramp up their dependence on it. Suddenly all those other news sources, the ones that aren't framing every story in terms of the user's core beliefs, they start to seem confusing and strange. They start to seem biased, actually, which is kind of funny. So now you've got a user who not only trusts you, you're his major source of information on what's happening in the world. Boom, you own that guy. You can tell him whatever you like and no one's contradicting you.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Attention words. A single word wasn't enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind's last door swung open.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“He'd basically fallen in love with her on the spot. Well, no, that wasn't accurate; that implied a binary state, a shifting from not-love to love, remaining static thereafter, and what he'd done with Brontë was fall and fall, increasingly faster the closer they drew, like planets drawn to each other's gravitational force. Doomed, he guessed, the same way.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“I’m Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“I love you,' she said. She nestled closer, her hand moving up the back of his neck. The wind lifted. 'Don't kill me,' he said. 'I'm not going to,' she said.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“[S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type--their true name, basically--and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves, and were carried away. They just didn't think there was anything magical about that anymore.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“Body parts telegraphed complaints from faraway places.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
“This isn't an accident; this happens because to people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below. They need to watch us. They need to monitor what we're thinking. It's the only thing between them and a guillotine.”
― Max Barry, quote from Lexicon
Max Barry
Born place: in Australia
See more on GoodReads
“The Astronomer
AN ASTRONOMER used to go out at night to observe the stars. One evening, as he wandered through the suburbs with his whole attention fixed on the sky, he fell accidentally into a deep well. While he lamented and bewailed his sores and bruises, and cried loudly for help, a neighbor ran to the well, and learning what had happened said: "Hark ye, old fellow, why, in striving to pry into what is in heaven, do you not manage to see what is on earth?”
― Aesop, quote from Aesop's Fables
“Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there…the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”
― Joe Haldeman, quote from The Forever War
“The race is to the driven, not the swift.”
― John Jakes, quote from North and South
“That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from About a Boy
“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.”
― Jonathan Franzen, quote from Freedom
House Harkonnen
Red Country
Black Box
Not That Kind of Gir...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
