Ways and Means Quotes

“Add up everything you’re willing to give, subtract what you might get back, and whatever’s left over is the measure of your soul.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“people every day that he alone could do it, who metastasized his following by stirring hate, who smacked the people with the same hand out of which he promised to feed them. He was the public face of this private peerage, revealing in his grotesquerie”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“They ate in silence for a while. Birds made complicated conversation in the trees outside.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“But the liberal-democratic system provides no erotic satisfaction. The violent, discriminating, hierarchal libido has no outlet in a world of kindness, peace, and civility.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“Mark wasn’t sure why Arty had decided not to bequeath the company to Eddie, though surely Eddie’s alcoholism, amoral ruthlessness, and all-around terribleness were factors.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“Janet squinted as if to shield her eyes. Money, Mark knew, was a gnat of complexity forever hovering at the edges of her vision, encroaching on what she considered to be simple pleasures.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“He passed Scranton, which the world made fun of only because it had never heard of Binghamton.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“billionaires had accrued their wealth and power at the expense of the government and of the people themselves, that their genius and efficiency lay in shirking taxes, suppressing wages, militating against antitrust reform, busting unions.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“Herve was only part of a larger trend, an increasing concentration of wealth and decision-making power in the hands of an unelected few, a self-appointed peerage of benevolent billionaires.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“Alistair felt confirmed in his sense, formed during his years of pornographically researching billionaires, that online knowability was inversely correlated with wealth except at the very top end:”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“He suspected Mark looked at his checking account about as frequently as he cooked.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“The guys at the repo desk, Alistair discovered that June, turned out to be characters from a Sunday cartoon about finance.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“To his right loomed the gray hulk of the Intrepid. Visitors traversed its deck, shuffling and inspecting, like ants looting the carcass of a whale.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“The only paid artistic work he managed to secure, as far as Elijah knew, consisted of taking photographs and designing posters for an all-female, all-cancer-survivor bluegrass band called Nocturnal Remissions.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means

“Mark—English, Hamilton College—was the oldest and least competent unpaid intern in the editorial department at the New York Review of Books.”
― Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means