Quotes from Max Barry

Apparently we're now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don't think anything of it.

He kissed her, because fuck it, he was probably about to die.

Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel.

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.

I guess it's always uncomfortable to discover you're not as individual as you thought. But it really bothered me. From one perspective, I was an independent animal, exercising free will in order to elicit predictable reactions from an inert vending machine. But from another, the vending machine was choosing to withhold snacks in order to extract predictable, mechanical reactions from young men. I couldn't figure out any objective reason to consider one scenario more likely than the other.

I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.

A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.

I'm Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!

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.

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.

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.

She could taste loss in the back of her throat so badly that she could vomit.

Two things.' 'Name them. I am instructing you to name them.' '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. That's the first thing.' Yeats didn't react. If anything, he seemed baffled. 'The second thing is I wouldn't characterize Harry as indecisive and untrained with weapons.'

I'm not a privacy nut, and I don't care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they're all working for that data, how much money they're spending, and how they never admit that's what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.

Body parts telegraphed complaints from faraway places.

Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they extorted upon the landscape.

I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific advancement. But the guy was a dick. I wondered when that had happened; that we had started making better machines than people.

It was pointless to ponder who I was because I was whichever combination of chemicals happened to be sloshing around at that time. So I decided not to search for a true self. I decided to choose who I wanted to be.

We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found.

You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-' Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it. Wil's eyes stung. 'See?' Eliot put away the gun. 'There are all kinds of persuasion.'

Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.' 'I have a superior brain?' 'Uh,' Eliot said, 'I wouldn't go that far.'

She decided to sleep with him and get it over with. It was the only way. He had become an annoying jingle, striking in the shower, or at work, or just as she was falling asleep. She had to at least kiss him deeply and completely, in a way that left nothing behind. So she could move on. So she could stop imagining it. She couldn't keep losing herself to the jingle. It was impairing her ability to function.

I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn't be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola's heart beat fastest for me.

intransigent." "Well