Matthew FitzSimmons > Quotes

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there’s nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Time was the great leveler, and neither money nor power held sway over its relentless march.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Politics is an ugly picture with a pretty frame.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“There was an old joke—it’s not the fall that kills you but the abrupt stop.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Humans are very good at inventing solutions and very, very bad at anticipating consequences.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, Constance

“Anyway, the trick is seeing what they’re trying to hide. What are they trying to draw your eye away from? Figure that out, and you figure out the man. Or woman. But start with men, because they’re easier. Women are more of a PhD thing.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“What was the first rule to getting someone to fall in line? Figure out what they need and give them a taste. Not enough to sate them, but enough to whet their appetite. Enough that they wanted more. Needed more.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline. But of course with enough money, it is possible not to notice for decades that your family name is gathering dust.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Why is it that the more I change, the more I need everything around me to stay the same? It’s a perverse design flaw in our species.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, Constance

“The problem with Insanity was how incredibly sane it felt. He bit his tongue and said nothing to the smirking ghost of his father.”
― Matthew Fitzsimmons

“When reporters asked him why he wanted to be president, Lombard mouthed the same elegant clichés that his forebears had uttered—platitudes about service and country and having a vision for the future of the nation. It was nonsense, of course, and he doubted that they had meant it any more than he did. The truth? When else in human history could someone ascend bloodlessly to become the most powerful man in the world? It was the chance to be a civilized god, and he didn’t trust anyone who aspired to less. But the difference between him and most people was that he’d been born for it. Made for it. The”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“In the immortal words of Duke Vaughn, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“This is the short drop,” the man said. “You’ll notice that, unlike the standard drop or the long drop, your neck is not broken. Which may seem like a blessing now, but in the end you will wish it had been a longer drop and a shorter wait. But that’s the good news and bad news of the short drop. You live longer, but . . . you live longer. Most people think they’d always want to live longer, but twenty minutes at the end of a rope is a long time to die. A long time to regret things that cannot be changed and that no longer matter.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“His regret was cold and offered no comfort. Filled up with words that he wished he had spoken and the faces he wished he had spoken them to.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“You couldn’t allow your past to define you.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“It’s at the edge where the truth lies. It’s like hair. Everyone brushes their hair so it looks good from straight on. Why? Because that’s how we see it in the mirror. Straight on. We only ever see ourselves straight on, so that’s the only angle we worry about.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“there are kings and there are kingmakers. Regardless of what populist history might argue, you rarely have one without the other.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“A memory swam up from the depths, its hideous, reptilian spine almost breaking the surface before it swam powerfully away from him.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“What happens next?” Gibson found he was curious too. They finished The Return of the King two years later, and in the process, Gibson became a reader. Something”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there's nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Most of life is lived to be forgotten. That was the way of things, cruel though it felt when it was your life that would be lost.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, Constance

“Measuring one’s life in terms of days was purposeless.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Usually you could count on rinky-dink networks like a public library to employ bottom-feeding IT personnel who were lazy or incompetent or both. Operating systems were often two generations out of date and hopelessly unpatched. Such networks were like big, friendly dogs; if you petted them they would roll right over and show you a dozen security vulnerabilities.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“You ever wish you could talk sense to who you used to be?”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, Cold Harbor

“For the next two weeks, WR8TH’s virus kept to its routine—waking up at nine a.m. and systematically nibbling away at ACG’s database. It was a model employee that way. Didn’t take a lunch break and never called in sick.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Most people were overawed by time. They allowed time to bully them, fearing that it was passing too fast or too slowly, sometimes both simultaneously. But”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“He returned her kindness in the form of an FBI raid on her home.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop

“Some speed-metal band that believed anything less than 250 beats a minute was elevator music. It amazed her what some people listened to voluntarily. She only knew it as the playlist of CIA black-site detention facilities around the world.”
― Matthew FitzSimmons, The Short Drop