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      "text": "This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.",
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      "text": "One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.",
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      "text": "This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.",
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      "text": "This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.",
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      "text": "Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying Yuxia for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain. Because she didn’t want men covering for her. Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.",
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      "text": "Far from wanting to pull a gun and shoot the man, Csongor now wanted to stand here and ask him questions all day. It was such a pleasure to be around someone who actually knew what the hell was going on.",
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      "text": "\"Do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked. “It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.” “What does that mean?\" “Too many neighbors.”",
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      "text": "Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children.",
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      "text": "“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. The vast popularity attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”",
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      "text": "There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “A's hire A's, and B's hire C's,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to sign up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.",
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      "text": "And so it was that Richard had conceived Corporation 9592’s Writers in Residence Program. Years later, he was astounded by the naïveté of it. Writers, as it turned out, rather liked having residences. Once they had moved in, it was nearly impossible to dislodge them.",
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      "text": "As a fantasy writer, Skraelin was not highly regarded… “…one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground…” “…so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off…” “…to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements…” But he was so freakishly prolific…and prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game.",
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