Eric

“This may come as a surprise to some of you, but Federal Express is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. I mention this because we have been spending $50,000 a month with them and there is no explanation to justify this expenditure unless it was an intercompany transfer.”
― Alan C. Greenberg, Memos from the Chairman

“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“There were two elements to look for in any draft: one was the accuracy in reflecting the deal, and the other, its omissions. The difficult part was to find out what had been left out. Frank would start with "what if" and then go through the structure of the draft and see how it worked. . . . The process of asking questions was like playing pinball. He'd run the ball through the maze and see what lit up and what didn't. He would spend ten or fifteen balls through with me, and the agreement would start to take on shape, then three dimensions and life. When its inadequacies showed, he asked the inevitable question: Could we layer on another level of complexity to account for the omissions? Of course.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach