Marcus Sakey Quotes

Our daughter is not going to an academy." I MISS MY SON, her sign had read. "Period. I don't care if she's tier one. I don't care if she's the first tier zero in history and can manipulate space-time while shooting lasers from her belly button. She is not going to an academy.

No, the great thing about the truth is that it's true.

You are going to find that the heights you've attained make for a long fall if you don't understand the mountain.

So, Abe's blood was spattered all over the walls of his office." Quinn traced a hand down the doorframe and looked at him meaningfully. "You might want to consider whether you really want the same people to come looking for you." He smiled without warmth as he made a business card appear. "Call me when you get it through your head that you're in danger.

And you'll need a leader to do it. A man of bold vision, one who promises you a world where you're not only safe - you're in charge. Not equal rights. Superiority for the superior.

Over the last week, if there's anything I've learned, it's that you're only who you choose to be. Every moment. The past is gone. Memories are no more solid than dreams. The only real thing, the only true thing, is the present. That's it."
-- "So the things we've done don't count?"
"Of course they do. But we can decide how much. ​And we can decide what we want the present to be like. We can live it however we want.

A little." She set it on the counter. "But it's probably not a terrible idea. Just in case.

Cooper had a theory about personality. Most people considered personality to be a singular identity. Malleable, sure, but essentially cohesive. But he tended to see people as more of a chorus. Every stage in life added a voice to that chorus. The different iterations of himself - lonely military brat, cocky teenager, faithful soldier, young husband, dedicated father, relentless hunter - they all existed within him.

You don't know that. And now we never will." "We're agents of the United States government, not some Third World dictator's private security force. That is not the way we work. We don't have

That was the lure of wealth, he'd discovered: a throaty whisper in your ear that you were special, that it was all - this wine, this woman, this world - for you. That it in some way existed only so that you might partake of it.

It was like meeting someone exceptional while you were married: the yank of possibility, the realization that here was another path your life could have taken.

Let us never yield to those who believe political power flows from the barrel of a gun, to

Cooper had been at a scene once where a car had collided with an agent and pinned him against a metal barrier, shattering everything from the ribs down, severing both legs at midthigh. Massive physical damage, unsurvivable. What had haunted him most, though, was that the man was calm. He didn't scream, didn't seem to feel any pain. Some wounds were too enormous to feel.

Maybe the world would burn. But if truth was all it took to start the fire, maybe it needed to.

Mom and Dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while Junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry.

Even Christ hadn't been able to sell salvation to contented sinners.

Revolution? You're an idiot. You don't even know what that word means. Forget your precious Mao and Che and Fidel. If they've appeared on a T-shirt, they haven't changed shit. You want revolution, look at Alexander Fleming. Penicillin transformed the world in ways Lenin and Washington only dreamt of. Now sit down and shut up, you autocratic frat boy. It's adult swim.

They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn't imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

Life is a raindrop

Cold liquid splashing across his face brought Kevin Temple back to himself. He'd been on the road all night, a dedicated run from Indiana hauling a load of fresh vegetables. Fifteen minutes out of the depot in Cleveland, and he had that stale feel, too much coffee washing down too much beef jerky. What he'd really been craving was a double cheeseburger, but while it would surprise no one to see a trucker gone flabby around

A bar like this anywhere else, there would be beer signs. You know, the old-school logos, the Clydesdales. And even the new beers, they make signs that consciously reflect the ones that came before. Because that's the way it's done. You brew a beer, you make a sign for it. It's like a pool table in a bar, even though no one really knows how to play pool anymore. Our grandparents shot pool; we get drunk and whack at the balls with warped sticks. No one thinks about it, but it's nostalgia. It's a sense of the past, of the way things are done.

Much of anything. But put a series together and patterns emerged. Some were obvious: haircuts, weight gained or lost, fashion trends. Others required

A city of unarmed dreamers huddling beneath angry skies.

Just drop your jeans and gimme those genes.

fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible.

I'm always geeking out about something.

We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.

But a sniper rifle was a matter of pure mechanics. Brace it, breathe properly, squeeze rather than pull the trigger, and it was just a projection of will across distance.

Cooper pulled out a high-backed stool, sat down, tapped out the beat on the bar with his fingertips. He'd heard once that the essence of country music was three chords and the truth. Well, the three-chords part still stands.

It had been a surprise - and yeah, okay, a pleasure - to realize how very good he was at being bad.

There was a rumor - a joke? Hard to tell at the DAR - that the fluorescent bulbs were the result of a multimillion-dollar program specially engineered to offer the most hopeless light possible. Cooper didn't know about that, but they did make everyone look two weeks dead.

The nature of compromise was that no one was happy. That's how you knew a fair deal had been reached.

Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.

Back when they had been teenagers who thought love was a noun, a thing you could possess.

The glass wall behind must have blown out as well, four stories of lethal shards surfing the roar of air and fire.

Professional communications had always been about the attempt to generate memes, to make a message viral; abnorms just took that to a higher level. Back when he'd been a DAR agent, Cooper had read a brief arguing memetics was the most dangerous gift. As politicians had long known, people preferred short, catchy answers to complex ones, even if the short answers were oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness. Phrases like "old-world thinking" could be as devastating as a bomb, and much farther ranging.

Data. That's what matters. That's what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it's useless.

The problem with the best moment in your life is that every other moment is worse

Averaging the bids to arrive at a final price, the Leon

Now she sat on a bench alongside Valerie West, the two of them pretending to be on their lunch. Val was a whiz with data analysis, but nervous in the field. Cooper was watching her shred her napkin, and weighing whether it was worth it to say something, when Luisa touched the other woman's knee, said something off-mic. Valerie nodded, shrugged her shoulders back, and tucked the napkin in her pocket. Good. Normally Cooper would have discouraged a romantic relationship between teammates, but the two often seemed better agents because of it.

He'd chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.

He never realized how noisy American silence was until all the gadgets died.

The truth was, everything in life came down to intentions and results. Cooper's intentions in killing Peters and releasing the video had been good; the results had been a disaster. Did that make his intentions wrong? If so, that meant morality was really only a way of talking about how we wished things were. Hope, empathy, idealism - maybe they didn't matter. Maybe the only thing that counted was results.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Among them Senator Blake Crouch (D-Colo.), who last year became the first gifted member of the US Senate.

Funny, there had been a time when building things was what America did. From massive dams to towering skyscrapers, from mechanized factories to moon rockets, the nation had created, had viewed that as part of the national identity.

Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

That's insane," said a goateed kid in front of Ethan. "You're locking down the whole city to catch a couple of terrorists? That doesn't make any sense.