I like having the pressure on me. My teammates played a great game tonight, and I just did my job.

I don't know if beating them in the fourth overtime like that was necessarily a good thing for us. It made it seem like we had done it, when we actually hadn't.

We knew coming into this year that the bar was raised, and I think we all knew what we wanted to do. We just didn't know if we had it in us to do it. But we proved it to ourselves that we could.

This is the wonderful thing about espionage, nothing exists any more.

He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza, "or connected with rich persons."
"Yes—the clothes, the coins ..."
"All fakeable."
"How do you know him to be rich, then?"
"In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games."
(Jack Shaftoe and Eliza)

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story.