Quotes from Max Barry

I had to train myself to accept that not everybody works as hard as me. That what I consider unacceptably sloppy is actually an okay result, and it's counterproductive to get into a whole thing where someone starts crying and threatening to quit. And you know what? Learning that not only helped me grow as a manager. It helped me grow as a person.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which was the order in which people optimally satisfied different types of desires (food-safety-love-status-enlightenment).

Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of PowerPoint slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies.

These tests, though, were making her feel like a moron.

In a way, Jennifer felt bad, busting into such a nice place in full riot gear and scaring the crap out of everybody. But in another, more accurate way, she enjoyed it a lot.

If Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

We can't take that step. It's illegal, and more importantly it's bad business.

Roger picks up a sachet of sugar and shakes it as if it's in need of discipline: wap-wap-wap-wap.

haze condensed into Campbell. The reason he was lopsided

Jackson: This is a debrief, Life. Your feelings aren't relevant except insofar as they imply personal weakness. There's a time and place to discuss such things, and it's when we get back home, with someone else.

closure was like the sealing of a tomb. The engine turned.

somewhere along the line, this freedom stuff got way out of control.

it's much easier to be incomprehensible than intelligent, and most people can't spot the difference.

As opposed to now, when it seemed like almost everything was either terrible or in the process of being made that way by entrenched assholes, while nobody gave a shit.

Best thing I've read in a long, long time." —Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

irony irritated him. There was no place for irony in marketing: it made people want to look for deeper meaning. There was no place in marketing for that, either.

Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was

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 exerted upon the landscape. This was what survived them. A hundred billion lives had passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians had raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally.

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 exerted upon the landscape.

He tilted his head to one side. She would come to know this gesture well over the next two years: Gilly mentally ratcheting his intelligence down until he found a level he could share with her. "The ship isn't alive. It can't communicate with us." "But

It didn't seem right to Buy that it was so easy.

He didn't want to say the word alive. And not just because it seemed so silly, putting that on an official record, but also because, alone in his cabin, it suddenly felt like the ship was listening. He didn't want it to hear him.

her stars; they had been waiting her whole life and she only had to find a way to reach them. But now that she saw them unfiltered, she felt revolted. They weren't beautiful. They were the lights of anglerfish, deep-sea monstrosities with glowing lures, calling the small and stupid toward jaws and needle teeth. There was only death out here, only void and fire, and the true beauty in the universe was what she had left behind.

The easier your job, the more you got paid. John had suspected this for many years, but here was the proof: pulling down five hundred bucks an hour to sit in the afternoon sun on top of an L.A. office tower.