"The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day." Prologue, pg. xiii

"The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all." Chapter 1, pg. 7

"The credit default swap would solve the single biggest problem with Mike Burry's big idea: timing. The subprime mortgage loans being made in early 2005 were, he felt, almost certain to go bad." Chapter 2, pg. 30

"Rather than cave to the pressure, Lippmann instead had an idea for making it vanish: kill the new market." Chapter 3, pg. 83

"The more they examined the individual bonds, the more they came to see patterns in the loans that could be exploited for profit." Chapter 4, pg. 97

"A smaller number of people&mdash...