Reece Hirsch > Quotes

“I want to stop becoming something & start being something.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Insider

“She had not understood what he said, but she took him in with a glance that made Will feel like he had just had one of those full-body MRI scans, the kind that find more things wrong with you than you ever could have imagined.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Insider

“During the years of struggling to make partner, he had sometimes entertained the comical notion that making partner would imbue him with new powers, like a budding superhero who had been bitten by a radioactive spider. It appeared that any superpowers he had gained did not include the ability to pick up women in bars.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Insider

“Depression was like a dark room, a black nowhere. Having a drink was like lighting a match—its flicker helped but only briefly. She knew that you couldn’t live your life madly burning through matchbooks—you had to somehow let your eyes adjust and learn to see clearly with the little bit of light that was available to you.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“I think if my books have a theme, it’s that statement that you find stenciled on rear-view mirrors – “Objects Are Closer Than They Appear.” Technology has connected people in so many positive ways, but there’s a dark side to it, too. As our lives become more and more dependent on the Internet and smart phones, technology brings a lot of bad things right to our doorstep, from hackers and cybercriminals to government surveillance. I think it’s a very modern sort of fear that, wherever you go, if you’re connected, bad people have the ability to reach out and touch you – and not in a good way.”
― Reece Hirsch

“She wasn’t kidding herself; there was no cure for what she had. But there was the work, and her colleagues, and that helped too.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“He was making so much money from Kyte that it was becoming apparent to the cartels. Now the chum was in the water, and the sharks were circling. He should have known that people would come for him and try to take the site from him.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“It’s … clear that we’re not as prepared as we should be, as a government or as a country… . Just as we failed in the past to invest in our physical infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, and rails—we’ve failed to invest in the security of our digital infrastructure… . We saw this in the disorganized response to [computer virus] Conficker. This status quo is no longer acceptable—not when there’s so much at stake. —President Barack Obama”
― Reece Hirsch, The Adversary

“Dave Silver was often preceded by the word “visionary” but, in fact, what made people like him compelling was their ability to be willfully blind to everything but their own view of the world.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Adversary

“It means I wanted to do more than just follow that path—degree, job, marriage, kids, retirement. I was willing to put myself at risk to have a life that was bigger than that. I bet big, and yeah, I lost. But at least I tried. I never wanted to be someone’s employee all my life, someone who never really had any skin in the game.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Ever since she was a kid, Lisa had been drawn to computing and coding. Science was about uncovering the rules that governed our world, but computing was about writing the rules, creating entire universes out of zeros and ones.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“We’ve created a community of people who are discovering what it feels like to be truly free in this one aspect of their lives—free of taxes, free of government regulation, free of warrantless wiretapping and surveillance.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“At the root of this new feeling was the realization that he was going to die--but not today. I'm going to die. When you first grasp that concept as a child, it seems like a revelation that is both monumental and entirely irrelevant, like the fact that there are millions of stars like our sun scattered through the universe. As you move through your life, you say the words to yourself with varying degrees of conviction. When a car runs a red light and misses you by inches in an intersection, you say it and you mean it for a moment.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Adversary

“The Kyte network was a thicket of proxy-server IP addresses and usernames that led nowhere. In order to truly make the case against CaptainMal, she needed to locate Kyte’s server, which could be anywhere among the hundreds of millions of computers in the world.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Without discounting the crimes, it was no mystery how poverty, a culture of addiction, and a cycle of violence could produce someone capable of climbing the bloody ladder to the top of a criminal empire and maintaining that position by slaughtering everyone in his path.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“What’s unusual is the scale of it. It looks like it could be processing hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of dollars in transactions.” “Per year?” “Per month.” Gilbertson frowned. “That can’t be right. Show me.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“the human mind there was at least as much darkness as there was light, and that fact might as well be embraced. To do otherwise, Tao believed, was to willfully misunderstand those around you. Tao”
― Reece Hirsch, Intrusion

“Internet relay chat, or IRC, boards, were online forums where hackers could communicate with relative anonymity.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“When the depression swelled, it seemed to leach all of the color out of the world. She felt as if she were on a planet of her own, laboring in a heavy gravitational field that affected only her, barely able to move, barely able to speak, as the world careened heedlessly, stupidly past at full throttle.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“Nate recognized a similar condition in his friends who had moved to LA and fallen under the spell of the film industry. Down there everyone knew weekend box office grosses. In the Valley, everyone knew whether the latest IPO had met expectations. If you lived in LA, you couldn’t help but envy the studio execs and film stars when you glimpsed them behind tinted windows, gliding down Sunset Boulevard in their Range Rovers. If you lived in the Valley, the cool kids were the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who could sometimes be spotted piloting their humming Teslas into the gleaming, low-slung corporate campuses of Menlo Park, Milpitas, and Cupertino.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“A Commonwealth of Dominica passport provided visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to more than 115 countries around the world, including the entire European Union, which made it the perfect accessory for any fugitive’s well-stocked go bag. As an added bonus, he could sock away millions of dollars of his Kyte profits in Dominica’s banks without attracting the attention of the IRS or the FBI.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere

“represented a kind of perverted life-force that propagated until growth became just another form of destruction. Computer viruses and cancers were about a failure to follow norms.”
― Reece Hirsch, The Adversary

“The government’s “war on drugs” is an abject failure because it supposes that the state can control human behavior—and has the right to do so.”
― Reece Hirsch, Black Nowhere