Eric

“This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“This may come as a surprise to some of you, but Federal Express is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc. I mention this because we have been spending $50,000 a month with them and there is no explanation to justify this expenditure unless it was an intercompany transfer.”
― Alan C. Greenberg, Memos from the Chairman

“Each looked at the process [of drafting an agreement] as drawing a series of concentric circles to circumscribe the risks, with the issues in the inner rings being the most likely risks. They tried to draw as many circles as reasonably necessary, without burdening the deal with too much complexity. Frank's structures were often elliptical, covering issues in the outer rings while sometimes leaving others reasonably near the center uncovered. Marshall's deals were more symmetrical and less complex, unlikely to cover remote or novel risks not in the center (although possibly a problem in time), since he proceeded from precedent.”
― Lawrence Lederman, Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

“Hewlett-Packard is somewhat riskier than GE; Amazon.com, riskier still.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management