Seth Fried > Quotes

“Just my luck. The first colleague I'd befriended at the agency and it was an alcoholic supercomputer.”
― Seth Fried, The Municipalists

“Here, pay attention, what I'm about to tell you is the truest, most important thing: None of us is right.”
― Seth Fried, The Municipalists

“What I am saying is that only when you give up on the fantasy of moral authority can you approach any problem without doing more harm than good.”
― Seth Fried, The Municipalists

“It’s no surprise that small romances began to bubble up throughout the lab. At the time, it seemed to make sense. It wasn’t long before our working together in such close proximity, together with the general excitement of the task at hand, led to lingering glances over calorimeters, colleagues leaning in to share the dual eyepieces on comparison microscopes, the sudden, accidental brush of hands simultaneously attempting to adjust the needle valves of Bunsen burners. When we examined some of the pollen we found in Loeka’s colon, it turned out the cells within the pollen were still intact, which meant that Loeka’s death could be placed sometime during the spring. Spring!”
― Seth Fried, The Great Frustration

“A man holding an assault rifle ordered me out into the hallway. There was a whole tactical assault team standing behind him.
“This is so flattering,” OWEN said in my ear as I exited the room. “Look how many guns they brought.”
― Seth Fried, The Municipalists

“The Project Elects assured us that dropping the monkey into the volcano was important. They scribbled impatiently on the blackboard in the demonstration room. They drew a picture of the monkey peeking out of the capsule’s small window and smiling. They drew themselves standing on the tarmac and smiling. They drew a picture of us having wild sex with each other in the locker room and smiling. Look, they said, everybody’s happy.
And if our own happiness wasn’t enough to make us put the monkey in the capsule, they reminded us that we were replaceable, that we were, in fact, desirable only in the sense that we were so totally capable of being replaced, that we were all a bunch of yo-yos, that we were lucky to know there even was a monkey.”
― Seth Fried, The Great Frustration

“Couldn’t you have lied about something else?"
OWEN gave me a long, blank look, as if by asking this question I had betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding with respect to the intensity of his hangover.”
― Seth Fried, The Municipalists