People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they’ll spend all day telling you who they are.
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.
Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don’t understand these things.
Well, I like to know where I’m going before I try to get there. It’s a mistake to try to execute a plan before you’ve thought of one, in my experience.
Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.
There’s no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.
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.
‘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.’
Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.
That’s the thing you learn about values: they’re what people make up to justify what they did.
[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.
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.
What was it Like?””What was what like?” he said, although he knew.”Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light.” “It was like being fucked in the brain.
‘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.’