Max Barry > Quotes

“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”
― Max Barry, 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, Lexicon

“every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged”
― Max Barry, 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, Lexicon

“There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.”
― Max Barry, Company

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Lexicon

“I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.”
― Max Barry, Machine Man

“Everyone's broken, one way or another.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.”
― Max Barry, Company

“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.”
― Max Barry, Company

“To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“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.”
― Max Barry, Syrup

“You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don't even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I don't know them. And even the people I do, like you two, and Elizabeth, and Roger - do I really? I mean, I like you guys, but we only ever talk about work. When I'm out with friends, or at home, I never talk about work. The other day, I tried to explain to my sister why it's such a huge deal that Elizabeth ate Roger's donut, and she thought I was insane. And you know what, I agreed with her. At home I couldn't even think why it mattered. Because I'm a different person at home. When I leave this place at night, I can feel myself changing. Like shifting gears in my head. And you guys don't know that; you just know what I'm like here, which is terrible, because I think I'm better away from work. I don't even like who I am here. Is that just me? Or is everyone different when they come to work? If they are, then what are they really like? How can we ever know? All we know are the Work People.”
― Max Barry, Company

“Stop believing what you want to believe. It’s unbecoming”
― Max Barry, 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, Lexicon

“The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.”
― Max Barry, 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, 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, Lexicon

“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.”
― Max Barry, Company

“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, 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, Lexicon

“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.”
― Max Barry, Company

“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.”
― Max Barry, Jennifer Government

“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.”
― Max Barry, Jennifer Government

“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, Lexicon