The Last Days of Night Quotes

“Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born. —NIKOLA TESLA, FROM HIS DIARY A”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“I believe it is worthwhile trying to discover more about the world, even if this only teaches us how little we know.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“One doesn't lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious….He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: There will always be some who misunderstand you. —”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you're ever given a thing.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don’t feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they’re said to be blossoming.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Sometimes I hate it so much,” she said. “Always having to pretend.” Paul gripped her fingers tighter. “This is America,” he said. “We’re all pretending.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The United States was of an anti-intellectual bent. And yet the two most technologically advanced laboratories in the world, as far as Paul could tell, were no longer in Paris’s Louvre or London’s Burlington House. They were now in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were operated by two self-made men with no formal training at all.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“But this is the very thing about electricity. Nothing about it makes any common sense at all.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Westinghouse was responsible for tremendous feats of manufacturing—extremely well-built devices made by a factory of hundreds, each one supplying a part. A chain of construction. Edison, on the other hand, had built himself a factory that did not produce machines, but rather ideas.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“[In any] machine, the failure of one part to cooperate properly with the other part disorganizes the whole and renders it inoperative for the purpose intended. —THOMAS EDISON R”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The immolation occurred late on a Friday morning. The lunchtime bustle was picking up as Paul descended from his office building onto the crowded street. He cut an imposing figure against the flow of pedestrians: six feet four inches, broad shouldered, clean-shaven, clothed in the matching black coat, vest, and long tie that was to be expected of New York’s young professional men. His hair, perfectly parted on the left, had just begun to recede into a gentle widow’s peak. He looked older than his twenty-six years. As”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“He's just a man," said Paul. "No matter what The Sun says about him."
"He makes miracles. Lightning in a glass bottle. Voices in a copper wire. What kind of a man can do that?"
"A rich one.)”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Picasso had a saying—“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. —Steve Jobs, misattributing a quote to Pablo Picasso”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what is going on. —JACQUES COUSTEAU”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The genius of each of these men was not in the labors of his own hands, it was in the efficiency of the system he had built.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. T. Edison

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. T. Edison

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. Buckminster Fuller

Be alone: that is the secret of invention. Be alone: that is when ideas are born. N.Tesla

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Steve Jobs

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you, because bad news is a headline and gradual improvement is now. Bill Gates

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time. Steve Jobs

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open. A.G.Bell

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. B. Franklin

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. A.Einstein

That's been one of my mantras: focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. But is's worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs

We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work. T. Edison

Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday. Steve Jobs”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. —STEVE JOBS”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“All stories are love stories. Paul remembered someone famous saying that. Thomas Edison’s would be no exception. All men get the things they love. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“And yet as pristine as she appeared, her demeanor was not delicate. She was no porcelain doll. She was a distant glacier. Remote, quiet, and yet possessed of great and unknowable activity beneath the surface.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night