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Austin Grossman

Austin Grossman Books

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Crooked

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“Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.”

ImaginationMythologyGamingVideo GamesArcadesRussell MarshHuman ExpressionJoystickBathysphereCode Breaking ApparatusMilitary Cryptography
Book:You
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“It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror. More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?”

Growing UpAnxietyTerrorContentmentIntrospectionGood DaysRussell MarshDragonbornAnimating EssenceDragonborn DaysEndoriaWave Of Terror
Book:You
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“He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them.”

High SchoolLunchPartiesSimon BertucciHigh School Parties
Book:You
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“I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because—and why this should be I’ll never know—I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.”

FailureBitterness
Book:Crooked
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“People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us. What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy.”

American PoliticsVice PresidentNixon
Book:Crooked
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“What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.”

American PoliticsVice PresidentPolitical Campaigns
Book:Crooked
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“Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon's Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights).”

Self DestructiveExtrovertJohn LennonCommercialPaul MccartneyKeith RichardsMick JaggerSimon BertucciDarren AckermanMoody IntrospectiveQuasi Mystical InsightsVirtuosic
Book:You
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“Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.”

HeroinInteractiveVideo GamesLittle Red Riding HoodRussell MarshThrough The WoodsHeroin And Only HeroinNot My StoryOver The River
Book:You
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“I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.”

ChicagoEinsteinGrappling Hook
Book:Soon I Will Be Invincible
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“Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.”

IfsKnowsWantFirstsHeartKindChildrenDifferentSchoolGivenStreetsCollegeColdHeroWarmAlienationRainyInvertedFirst Day Of SchoolBangkok
Author:Austin Grossman
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“I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.”

IfsMenWorldDoneEyeLinesWonderBattleSkinsChecksChampionChocolateMilkMetalsCapesShuffleCafeteriaStandstillChocolate Milk
Author:Austin Grossman
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