Max Barry Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum.

Max Barry

#4. It was funny how as soon as you knew there was something better, what you had seemed unbearable.

Max Barry

#5. A woman appeared and began to generate tea and coffee

Max Barry

#6. Body parts telegraphed complaints from faraway places.

Max Barry

#7. I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific advancement. But the guy was a dick. I wondered when that had happened; that we had started making better machines than people.

Max Barry

#8. Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu," she said.

Max Barry

#9. 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

#10. Some people would break the rules to get things done and some wouldn't; it was simple as that. John didn't have much use for the latter.

Max Barry

#11. What was it Like?"
"What was what like?" he said, although he knew.
"Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light."
"It was like being fucked in the brain.

Max Barry

#12. This isn't an accident; this happens because to people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below. They need to watch us. They need to monitor what we're thinking. It's the only thing between them and a guillotine.

Max Barry

#13. I don't know how anyone can appreciate devotion that slavish. It's not objective. I have a similar issue with religion.

Max Barry

#14. To succeed in sales, you need skills - not skills entirely consistent with moral integrity and emotional well-being, but skills nevertheless.

Max Barry

#15. [S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat.

Max Barry

#16. Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people's brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.

Max Barry

#17. There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.

Max Barry

#18. Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.

Max Barry

#19. A tragedy like this, we all blame ourselves.

Max Barry

#20. That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

Max Barry

#21. Elizabeth is smart, ruthless, and emotionally damaged ... [i]f Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye.

Max Barry

#22. She put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.

Max Barry

#23. It was pointless to ponder who I was because I was whichever combination of chemicals happened to be sloshing around at that time. So I decided not to search for a true self. I decided to choose who I wanted to be.

Max Barry

#24. Haze condensed into Campbell. The reason he was lopsided

Max Barry

#25. Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience.

Max Barry

#26. Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise.

Max Barry

#27. 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

#28. Apparently we're now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don't think anything of it.

Max Barry

#29. After a while, he sat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She felt very close to him. "I promise not to turn you into my thought slave," she said, and felt him smile a little. But she had thought about it.

Max Barry

#30. The newspapers said nobody made it out alive."
"Surely you didn't trust them.

Max Barry

#31. I'm Australian; I know how to use a shotgun!

Max Barry

#32. Stop believing what you want to believe. It's unbecoming

Max Barry

#33. Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?

Max Barry

#34. Everyone's broken, one way or another.

Max Barry

#35. These tests, though, were making her feel like a moron.

Max Barry

#36. A panic state is not helpful to good decision making.

Max Barry

#37. Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies. I don't understand these things.

Max Barry

#38. It is a building designed by committee: all they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over.

Max Barry

#39. What it comes down to, you see, is that a naked body is just a naked body.
But the possibility of a naked body is something special.

Max Barry

#40. I tended to be skeptical of anything that couldn't be measured, written down, and independently verified across a series of double-blind tests. But this was hard data. Lola's heart beat fastest for me.

Max Barry

#41. 'You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-'
Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it.
Wil's eyes stung.
'See?' Eliot put away the gun. 'There are all kinds of persuasion.'

Max Barry

#42. He kissed her, because fuck it, he was probably about to die.

Max Barry

#43. 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

#44. I remember when you could always rely on those little street kids to pop a few people for the latest Nikes," Vice-President John said. "Now people get mugged for Reeboks, for Adidas - for generics, for Christ's sake.

Max Barry

#45. By this action, the Government has proved that so long as it exists, none of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive. So if we value freedom, there's only one conclusion. It's time to get rid of this leftover relic we call Government.

Max Barry

#46. Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all. Now it was called smart trading.

Max Barry

#47. The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.

Max Barry

#48. These emotional cues were distracting. I was used to arguing with scientists who would explain with perfectly bland faces why you were wrong and stupid.

Max Barry

#49. 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

#50. '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

#51. We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found.

Max Barry

#52. 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

#53. People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.

Max Barry

#54. Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting.
There is, in fact, nothing.
And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.

Max Barry

#55. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel.

Max Barry

#56. Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It was refreshing and guenuine but sometimes led to situations like building a town around a hole.

Max Barry

#57. And I, methinks, am gone astray In trackless wastes and lone.

Max Barry

#58. 'Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.'
'I have a superior brain?'
'Uh,' Eliot said, 'I wouldn't go that far.'

Max Barry

#59. To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.

Max Barry

#60. Corporations! It's like there are these gigantic monsters living among us, and we don't mind that they're monsters because when we look at them they smile and hand us cheeseburgers. That's nuts.

Max Barry

#61. With Lola, everything was solvable. She was my independent variable.

Max Barry

#62. I must be the latest in a long line of freshly dismembered men to fall under the spell of Lola Shanks.

Max Barry

#63. When it's done with being graceful and poetic, language is meant to communicate, after all.

Max Barry

#64. When someone thinks, "I liked his last book, I'll hope this new one is good" and shells out their hard-earned, I fervently want that person to be thrilled.

Max Barry

#65. He went to rub his eyes and missed.

Max Barry

#66. 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

#67. Companies were getting a lot tougher on labor contracts these days; Hack had heard stories. At Adidas, if you quit your job and your replacement wasn't as competent, they sued you for lost profits.

Max Barry

#68. She could taste loss in the back of her throat so badly that she could vomit.

Max Barry

#69. I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two ... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.

Max Barry

#70. 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

#71. Every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged

Max Barry

#72. I will not be what I was made, but what I make.

Max Barry