Acquaintances
One of my rules for not overflowing this blog with quote posts (admittedly not a very succesful enterprise) is that a quote must bounce on my head on its own for some days, a week or two. Here’s an odd winner.
“Who are you taking me to meet?”
“A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine.”
“But not a friend?”
Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. “We’ve been friends sometimes. We’ve also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he’s one of those guys.”
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age AM
(Oh and btw, if you care for my unfiltered quotestream check out my Google Notebook. The app is still frustratingly primitive — all the more disappointing coming from Google, beta label notwithstanding — but the notebook’s already several hundred quotes strong.)