There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.
Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.
It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.
And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.
Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.
The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks – making things, learning things, remembering things – that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.
Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.
Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.
She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there’s a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn’t want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there’s some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing.
Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it.
What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all.
I’m starting to think paradise isn’t eternal contentment. It’s more like there’s something eternal about feeling contented. There’s no such thing as eternal life, because you’re never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you’re contented, because then time doesn’t matter.
And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf – felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.
She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.
The mark of a legitimate revolution – the scientific, for example – was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.