What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protec… - Emily St. John Mandel

I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom.

This whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him.

You know the phrase I keep thinking about?" a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. "'The chickens are coming home to roost.' Because it's never good chickens. It's never 'You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.