Quotes from Max Barry

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.

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.

What it comes down to, you see, is that a naked body is just a naked body. But the possibility of a naked body is something special.

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.

The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.

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.

Stop believing what you want to believe. It's unbecoming

Monday morning and there's one less donut than there should be. Keen observers note the reduced mass straightaway but stay silent, because saying, 'Hey, is that only six donuts?' would betray their donut experience. It's not great for your career to be known as the person who can spot the difference between six and seven donuts at a glance.

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.

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.

Companies were getting a lot tougher on labor contracts these days; Hack had heard stories. At Adidas, if you quit your job and your replacement wasn't as competent, they sued you for lost profits.

Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all. Now it was called smart trading.