Black Nowhere Quotes

“Depression was like a dark room, a black nowhere. Having a drink was like lighting a match—its flicker helped but only briefly. She knew that you couldn’t live your life madly burning through matchbooks—you had to somehow let your eyes adjust and learn to see clearly with the little bit of light that was available to you.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“It means I wanted to do more than just follow that path—degree, job, marriage, kids, retirement. I was willing to put myself at risk to have a life that was bigger than that. I bet big, and yeah, I lost. But at least I tried. I never wanted to be someone’s employee all my life, someone who never really had any skin in the game.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“We’ve created a community of people who are discovering what it feels like to be truly free in this one aspect of their lives—free of taxes, free of government regulation, free of warrantless wiretapping and surveillance.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Without discounting the crimes, it was no mystery how poverty, a culture of addiction, and a cycle of violence could produce someone capable of climbing the bloody ladder to the top of a criminal empire and maintaining that position by slaughtering everyone in his path.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“A Commonwealth of Dominica passport provided visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to more than 115 countries around the world, including the entire European Union, which made it the perfect accessory for any fugitive’s well-stocked go bag. As an added bonus, he could sock away millions of dollars of his Kyte profits in Dominica’s banks without attracting the attention of the IRS or the FBI.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“The Kyte network was a thicket of proxy-server IP addresses and usernames that led nowhere. In order to truly make the case against CaptainMal, she needed to locate Kyte’s server, which could be anywhere among the hundreds of millions of computers in the world.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“He was making so much money from Kyte that it was becoming apparent to the cartels. Now the chum was in the water, and the sharks were circling. He should have known that people would come for him and try to take the site from him.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Nate recognized a similar condition in his friends who had moved to LA and fallen under the spell of the film industry. Down there everyone knew weekend box office grosses. In the Valley, everyone knew whether the latest IPO had met expectations. If you lived in LA, you couldn’t help but envy the studio execs and film stars when you glimpsed them behind tinted windows, gliding down Sunset Boulevard in their Range Rovers. If you lived in the Valley, the cool kids were the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who could sometimes be spotted piloting their humming Teslas into the gleaming, low-slung corporate campuses of Menlo Park, Milpitas, and Cupertino.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Ever since she was a kid, Lisa had been drawn to computing and coding. Science was about uncovering the rules that governed our world, but computing was about writing the rules, creating entire universes out of zeros and ones.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“What’s unusual is the scale of it. It looks like it could be processing hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars in transactions.” “Per year?” “Per month.” Gilbertson frowned. “That can’t be right. Show me.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Internet relay chat, or IRC, boards, were online forums where hackers could communicate with relative anonymity.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“The government’s “war on drugs” is an abject failure because it supposes that the state can control human behavior—and has the right to do so.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“She wasn’t kidding herself; there was no cure for what she had. But there was the work, and her colleagues, and that helped too.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“When the depression swelled, it seemed to leach all of the color out of the world. She felt as if she were on a planet of her own, laboring in a heavy gravitational field that affected only her, barely able to move, barely able to speak, as the world careened heedlessly, stupidly past at full throttle.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere