“Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the Joyce I left a note that said well I guess I got no choice Scuse me girl while I m kicking it to the curb Leaving with all I need but less than I deserve”
“Enron was becoming a virtual cult of creativity, often placing swagger over substance. New ideas were celebrated for their newness, for their potential; tried and true businesses like the pipelines were almost derided.”
“Ultimately amorality is immorality.”
“Enron would keep its unearned windfall, generated solely because David Duncan didn t know what he was doing.”
“...Fastow had found someone trusting and pliable. Fastow wanted a pupet, Bowen concluded, and he already controlled Ben Glisan s strings. p.338”
“A eureka moment. It suddenly struck Mintz as so obvious. The executives entrusted with reviewing all of the LJM transactions- Causey, Buy, the board- approached their duties casually, giving everything just the onceover. They seemed to figure that somebody else was doing the tough analysis. But no one was. p.389”
“In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality. p.403”
“Kaminski plunged ahead. I am not going to sign off on anything related to the Raptors, he said. And I don t care if I m fired for it. Buy raised a hand. Whoa, wait a minute, I don t think you ll be fired, he replied quickly. Now that Skilling s gone, we have a different mantra in Enron. He looked Kaminski in the eye. We re expected to be honest , he said. p.525”
“Excuse me, Ben, Bowen said. Am I wrong, or aren t you the corporate treasurer? Glisan bristled. Yes. What do you mean, you think you can get one? Bowen shot back. This is the current fucking maturities schedule! Go get it. You have to have a maturities schedule! But they didn t. With all the focus on deals and earnings- with finance group s transformation into a profit center rather than a division to support the business- the workday, boring details had been sloughed off. p. 560”
“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game and do it by watching first some high-school or small-town teams”
“I knew that Sundays in England aren t just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.”
“Don’t seem to matter much where you are, but folks are always saying you shoulda been here long, long ago, the scene has all dried up. Georgie Harrison said it about Haight–Ashbury, and Sid and Nancy said it about the Chelsea Hotel. The only place they could never really say that about was MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. There was a crackle in the air that just let you know you were alive. As Bobby sang it, later there was music in the cafes and revolution wafting in the wind.”
“I went to watch the Buzkasgu game taking place on a series of fields - some fallow, some plowed and planted- just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball.”
“Das Netz ist das Ende des Mainstreams [...]”
“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this me which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer s life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features biographemes ; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.”
“I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.”
“I regained consciousness after a big night at the Cock and Bull Inn, or it could’ve been The Weasel’s Way or The Badger’s Breath, who knows with these weird English pub names. Anyway, it was somewhere near The Pig and Whistle. Not far up from the Scotsman’s Kilt.”