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What you’re asking is impossible—you want me to negotiate with you while you maintain the assumption that I’m operating in bad faith.
“At your age, life is full of possibilities. But as the years pass, those possibilities vanish, one by one, like doors closing in a hallway. You feel time slip by, and your energy slip away. One day, you realize you’re too old to be a famous musician, or change careers, or have more children. And each of those closed doors represents a regret. As you get older, well, those regrets come to define you. Perhaps the lack of a family life was Arthur’s regret.
like you’d use to deliver furniture. Zoey actually wasn’t sure which vehicle he was referring to, but Armando
Almost as if he had planned it that way.
I’m blunt and have no patience for wasted time or wasted words. Because I’m not nice.
“A clean conscience is expensive, it’s the reason most men have to live paycheck to paycheck.”
In the real world, bullets that miss their targets keep traveling until they hit something. They fly through windows, and into the bodies of bystanders. And even successfully killing a bad guy creates blowback, sets off a whole chain of consequences that are impossible to predict. Guns always represent a failure of negotiation.”
everybody thinks they’re the star
of their own movie,
“In programmer slang the rough code is the beta and the final working copy is the gold,
could very likely result in nuclear war and a subsequent chain reaction that would render all human life extinct from the universe forever. But of course no investment is completely free of risk.
The market is a machine, if any man is so foolish as to try to stop the works from turning, he should not be surprised when he gets ground up in its gears.
The market is a machine, and these are just the noises the gears make when they turn.
Statistically, the moment a woman accepts money for sex, her chances of being murdered shoot up five thousand percent—a woman who stays in that line of work has a life expectancy of thirty-four.
Any good plan is just a series of branching pathways, like a flowchart. We can’t predict what Molech is going to do, but his options aren’t infinite and we have to have a procedure in place regardless of which choice he makes.
The heads of the four males guarding the doorway turned to see a Bugatti Chiron crawl past, a legendary dream machine that, even in a city packed with gaudy automobiles, could drop jaws from a block away. It pulled up to the hotel next door and rolled to a stop. It revved its engine, and the pavement trembled in fear.
back to the middle henchman and said to Molech’s video face, “He’s going to kill you! I can stop him! Let my mom go, I’ll call off Armando, and we’ll all talk about this!”
A monster stood in the ragged remains of the doorframe. Not a monster—a man, made into a monster.
The henchman, now with a shark ferociously biting his crotch, flailed and stumbled and crashed through the shattered window.
Zoey would never forget the noise the helicopter’s blades made when they started sawing into Santa’s neck.
That, right there, is the difference between the heroes and the nobodies.
People like me know that there is no magic. There is only the grind. Work looks like magic to those unwilling to do it.”
There is no ‘chosen one,’ there is no destiny, nobody wakes up one day and finds out they’re amazing at something. There’s just slamming your head into the wall, refusing to take no for an answer. Being relentless, until either the wall or your head breaks. You want to be a hero? You don’t have to make some grand decision. There’s no inspirational music, there’s no montage. You just don’t quit.”
You’ll know that humans aren’t cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife. Because otherwise, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to die and you’re going to stand at the gates of judgment and you’re going to ask God what was the meaning of it all, and God will say, ‘I created the universe, you little shit. It was up to you to give it meaning.’”
and in the course of the day today I’ve kind of decided that the whole thing where we grant power based on who wants it most, is probably what has ruined society up to this point.
it all starts with this one fundamental principle: find out what the enemy is most afraid of, and you’ll also find what they’re the most eager to believe.”
“You can’t focus on death, or failure. Otherwise you’re surrendering greatness to all the people too dumb to contemplate it.”
“This is why people get obsessed with the apocalypse. They want the world to die with them.
We’re all selfish, we hate the thought of everyone just … moving on.”
That’s what it’s like being poor—choices are something you sit around and dream about having, some day after you strike it rich.
