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21 " it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. "
― Jonathan Franzen , Purity
22 " Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. "
23 " And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety. "
24 " 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. "
25 " Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away. "
26 " Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date. "
27 " Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. "
28 " 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. "
29 " Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it? "
30 " He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. "
31 " 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. "
32 " 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. "
33 " 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. "
34 " He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. "
35 " To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin. "
36 " Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal. "
37 " Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay? "
38 " The interesting people are always immoderate. "
39 " You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me. "
40 " The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He "