Bleeding Edge Quotes
"This morning, all up and down the streets, what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side has popped overnight into clusters of white pear blossoms."
"The school is named for an early psychoanalyst who was expelled from Freud’s inner circle because of a recapitulation theory he’d worked out."
"Maxine runs a small fraud-investigating agency down the street, called Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em."
"The Otto Kugelblitz School occupies three adjoining brownstones between Amsterdam and Columbus, on a cross street Law & Order has so far managed not to film on."
"Two-part buses, new on the routes, creep the crosstown blocks like giant insects."
"Sunlight reflected from east-facing apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of buildings across the street."
"Steel shutters are being rolled up, early trucks are double-parking, guys are out with hoses cleaning off their piece of sidewalk."
"Runners are bouncing up and down at the curb waiting for lights to change."
"Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies."
"Driscoll Padgett is a freelance Web-page designer, ‘making it up as I go along, just like everybody else,’ also temping as a code writer."
"Idea is to have a failsafe in case of a disaster, natural or man-made, you can hide your archive on redundant servers out in remote locations, hoping at least one’ll survive anything short of the end of the world."
"More likely just wants to keep stuff away from inquiring minds."
"Something, maybe only its amused vehemence, reminded him of older hackers from the nineties."
"No more dangerous than a chess game, it seems to Reg."
"Eric’s still intrigued. It’s dawning on him that this could be a kind of entrance exam."
"Actually, it’s a coastal thing you’re hearing, I don’t even know what I’m doing on this one anymore."
"Not the sort of thing you can just let go, I guess."
"As in "Don’t Stop Believing," Maxine imagines."
"How is a business plan that depends on faith in "network effects" kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme?"
"But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?"
"Late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of."
"Information wants to be free, but somebody's putting up password protection out of all proportion."
"Every now and then in the ladies' room, Maxine will find March regarding herself in the mirror with less than dismay."
"Certain types of personality get bent insanely out of shape, punishment is violent and immediate."
"Somebody discovered the invisible underground river of cash flowing through his soon-to-be-defunct company."
"It's exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer's heart sing."
"I think there's a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself."
"They cut us out. It was like they actively went seeking this life they have now, this faraway, virtual life."
"Late at night inescapable even if I wanted to escape."
"I use it all the time for shopping, tell people my credit-card numbers and stuff, nothing bad’s happened yet."
"You know you’re in trouble, right, so I don’t have to start in nagging about that."
"Cost of fucking up," quietly, no eye contact.
"I’ll take that as an OK on the exorbitant-interest clause, shall I?"
"Exactly the kind of fine line that got me tossed out of the game and puts your own ass in danger now."
"As kindly as I can put it, Lester, they don’t give a shit. ‘Sorry’ is for the local news channels."
"A crib as out of scale as Ice’s would mean a lot of smaller houses somehow have to be destroyed, part of maintaining the overall balance."
"I’m sorry. We can’t go any further. It’s nothing personal."
"The only help you’ll find now will be from some kind of outlaw, and I’m better than most."
"It’s not that often, as Daddy Warbucks always sez…"
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
"How about ‘professional’? Go ahead, wallow in hippie thoughts if you want, meantime Vip is floating out to sea and nobody’s told Search and Rescue about it."
"The streets are full of people who think they’ve been passed by."
"Once you’ve tried cop, you never want to stop."
"I don’t want to coordinate with the NYPD any more than I need to on this."
"You have to stop blaming yourself for this, you were the victim…"
"I should’ve just closed the doors on her and defaulted to the roof…"
"Why, it’s me dear wife’s own favorite scent, it is."
"You’re welcome to join us," Heidi struggling with the overeagerness.
"Guys, we’ll finish up the paperwork back at 57th, OK?"
"I mean obviously like a vegetarian, like a nonsmoker, but . . . what was Hitler’s cologne, for example?"
"You seemed . . . annoyed somehow, I’m sorry."
"Your husband was always in the picture, I knew that right away—well, actually, I smelled it, so I made the effort from then on to keep things strictly business with us, case you didn’t catch that."
"You want what, my blessing? Thinks I’m the Rabbi here. How about I write you an audit opinion, I could manage that."
"Something you'd never try at home, here in the toi-let."
"The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless."
"It wasn't me that ever 'knew' anything. But something did."
"He hates the Swedish DIY giant. He and Maxine once blew a weekend looking for the branch in Elizabeth, New Jersey."
"The drama on the tube is approaching a crisis, the babysitter’s evil scheme has begun to fall apart."
"As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them."
"In the business you run into far too many of these faces, don’t know what they want, or how much of it, or what to do with it once they have it."
"And what we've always been is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it."
"There’s no Escape key here. No way back to Game Shark hex cheats and them high-spirited li’l overflow stunts, no more happy times, now the only way left for me to go is deeper."
"Someday, Eric, they’re going to have the time machine, we’ll be able to book tickets online, we’ll all get to go back, maybe more than once, and rewrite it all the way it should have gone, not hurt the ones we hurt, not make the choices we made."
"You really think Bush’s people are behind this."
"She wants to touch him but is unsure of where."
"I’m just a fraud examiner. Bush, don’t get me started. The Arab angle, I have these Jewish reflexes, so I have to work to avoid paranoia on that subject also."
"The guys . . . I mean, we’re all stressed lately, but . . ."
"None of us know how complicated this is gonna get, who they’re really workin for, but if even people in D.C. are gettin worried now," tapping the dossier, "it’s cash-for-equity time."
"What should I do, I’m like so scared now, I’m in so deep?"
"I don’t suppose you could meet me down here."
"Suppose it’s all about losing, not finding. What has she lost?"
"Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?"
"These prove to be fertile sources of the links she needs to be clicking on."
"Ahead, past the baked-mud district that now rises around her, she can feel a presence."
"Never to focus on anything that can be seen."
"You might want to be careful, now—Vip? do you remember me?"
"Is what it is is . . . is it is what it is."
"It’s like committing adultery, only different?"
"Each Lord with his own army of unquiet dead, who wander the surface world bringing terrible afflictions to the living."
"The contents of the bowl give a slight but unmistakable surge upward, as if trying to communicate."
"The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice."
"The Internet kept evolving, away from military, into civilian—nowadays it’s chat rooms, the World Wide Web, shopping online."
"Maybe it’s all getting worse, I can’t just stand by anymore."
"In the tone of voice you use when you think somebody needs to have it explained."
"One day, on the express headed downtown from 72nd, a local happens to leave the station at the same time."
"On the one hand nonnuclear means minor league, while on the other, don’t rule out that they’re insane also."
"Blind confidence, sure disaster for the other guy, somehow it never works out."
"In a passage of lighthearted back-and-forth, Misha and Grisha discuss who is more of a wannabe badass than whom."
"Igor has soul crisis. He doesn’t only get out of Spetsnaz—when he has enough money, he sets up his own private reparation plan."
"The odd thing about March’s street is that it would be rejected by any movie-location scout, regardless of genre, as too well behaved."
"The only one who can get the potatoes mashed exactly the way you need ’em to be."
"Maybe last night the vircator in the trunk of the ZiL came on by accident?"
"All forms of reality in which the basic unit is the pixel, all of it gone down without a sigh into the frozen midwatch hour."
"This has drawn looks of distaste from the other two, so good, good, they agree on something at least, it’s a start."
"The boys commence their daily excursions in and out of the fridge."
"You’re just nervous, March, why don’t you both come over to my place, it’s a neutral corner."
"She wakes up around Spuyten Duyvil to Tallis’s sleeping face, closer to her own than you’d expect."
"In the train on the way back, Maxine must’ve fallen asleep. She dreams she’s still in the ZiL."