Cosmopolis

“Yesterday. At the complex. Our rapid-response team. There’s no vulnerable point of entry. Our insurer did a threat analysis. We’re buffered from attack.” “Everywhere.” “Yes.” “Including the car.” “Including, absolutely, yes.” “My car. This car.” “Eric, yes, please.” “We’ve been together, you and I, since the little bitty start-up. I want you to tell me that you still have the stamina to do this job. The single-mindedness.”

Ref. FD7B-A

“This car. Your car.” “The relentless will. Because I keep hearing about our legend. We’re all young and smart and were raised by wolves. But the phenomenon of reputation is a delicate thing. A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable. I know I’m asking the wrong

Ref. 0056-B

“I know I’m changing the subject. I haven’t been sleeping much. I look at books and drink brandy. But what happens to all the stretch limousines that prowl the throbbing city all day long? Where do they spend the night?”

Ref. 290F-C

“All this optimism, all this booming and soaring. Things happen like bang. This and that simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there’s a thousand things you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information.

Ref. C96A-D

love information. This is our sweetness and light. It’s a fuckall wonder. And we have meaning in the world. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do. But at the same time, what?”

Ref. 34C9-E

“Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.”

Ref. B00B-F

“You meant I was ruthlessly efficient. Talented, yes. In business, in personal acquisitions. Organizing my life in general.”

Ref. C492-G

“Not since an element of doubt began to enter your life.” “Doubt? What is doubt?” He said, “There is no doubt. Nobody doubts anymore.”

Ref. D920-H

“You’re beginning to think it’s more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt.”

Ref. BA4E-I

Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It’s not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors

Ref. 1A5B-J

that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it’s worth it. The number justifies itself.”

Ref. 7271-K

“Oh and this car, which I love. The glow of the screens. I love the screens. The glow of cyber-capital.

Ref. C82B-L

So radiant and seductive.

Ref. 47E3-M

It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism.

Ref. CA36-O

People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently.”

Ref. CF7F-P

“There are zeptoseconds.”

Ref. C5C4-Q

“Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second.”

Ref. F447-R

“Your genius and your animus have always been fully linked,” she said. “Your mind thrives on ill will toward others. So does your body, I think. Bad blood makes for long life.

Ref. 35DD-S

“To know and not to act is not to know.”

Ref. 3597-T

We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It’s simply how we live.”

Ref. D475-U

She finished with a laugh. Yes, he admired her gift for cogent speech, shapely and persuasive, with a rubbed finish. This is what he wanted from her. Organized thoughts, challenging remarks. But there was something dirty in her laugh. It was scornful and coarse.

Ref. 5AB7-V

“You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.” “Its own grave-diggers,” he said. “But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.”

Ref. CA80-W

They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.”

Ref. 38D1-X

“The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is

Ref. 6346-Y

what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?”

Ref. EE90-Z

“It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present.”

Ref. 4AC5-A

“The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We’re all tall and happy there,” she said. “This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.”

Ref. F891-B

“You know what anarchists have always believed.” “Yes.” “Tell me,” she said. “The urge to destroy is a creative urge.”

Ref. AEB8-C

“This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.”

Ref. FA44-D

“This is the thing about genius,” she said. “Genius alters the terms of its habitat.”

Ref. 5D32-E

“Think of it this way. There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception.”

Ref. D6E4-F

“Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don’t need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way.”

Ref. 3BEF-G

She opened her eyes and seemed to look right through him, speaking quietly, and he began to imagine her asquat his chest in the middle of the night, in candlelight, not sexually or demonically driven but there to speak into his fitful sleep, to trouble his dreams with her theories.

Ref. B38C-H

Where was her life? What did she do when she went home? Who was there besides the cat? He thought there had to be a cat. How could they talk about such things, these two? They were not qualified.

Ref. 9C52-I

“Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We’re too small and real to matter here,” she said. “Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down.”

Ref. C255-J

“You know what they say, don’t you?” “What?” “The logical extension of business is murder.”

Ref. 6920-K

don’t know how to be indifferent. I can’t master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words it hurts.”

Ref. 821C-L

“Look. I married you for your beauty but you don’t have to be beautiful. I married you for your money in a way, the history of it, piling up over generations, through world wars. This is not something I need but a little history is nice. The family retainers. The vintage cellars. Little intimate wine tastings. Spitting merlot together. This is stupid but nice. The estate-bottled wines. The statuary in the Renaissance garden, beneath the hilltop villa, among the lemon groves. But you don’t have to be rich.”

Ref. B915-M

“Why do you have to be rich, famous, brainy, powerful and feared?”

Ref. F289-N