Lexicon 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

“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

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

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

“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

“Stop believing what you want to believe. It’s unbecoming”
― 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

“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

“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

“Attention words. A single word wasn't enough. Not even for a particular segment. The brain had defenses, filters evolved over millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first was perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few key data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data got by the perception filter, it received attention. And she saw now that it must be like that all the way down: There must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This was what they were teaching her. How to craft a string of words that would disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind's last door swung open.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“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 creepy as hell.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“He kissed her, because fuck it, he was probably about to die.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type--their true name, basically--and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves, and were carried away. They just didn't think there was anything magical about that anymore.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“What we're doing, or, I should say, what you're doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people's brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you do that by speaking a string of words crafted for the person's psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it's a string of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.'

Jeremy said, 'How do you know this?'

'Do you think I'm smart?'

'I think you're scary,' he said.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

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

“I’m Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“Civilizations rose and fell; what caused them to be remembered was not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they extorted upon the landscape.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“She could taste loss in the back of her throat so badly that she could vomit.”
― Max Barry, Lexicon