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141 " How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth. "
― Jonathan Franzen , Purity
142 " It was like watching a pair of Hollywood execs abuse each other—you had to be powerful to take the abuse with a laugh. "
143 " He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. "
144 " Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe. "
145 " With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms. "
146 " It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she'd been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting. "
147 " From somewhere, in college, Pip had gotten the idea—her mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by—that the height of civilization was to spend Sunday morning reading an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times at a café. This had become her weekly ritual, and, in truth, "
148 " available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. "
149 " And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila. "
150 " Dogs again had it right. They didn’t trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway. "
151 " It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion. "
152 " Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window. "
153 " task "
154 " I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,” he’d said to her once. “What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.” And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them. She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again. "
155 " Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts. "
156 " the main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat. "
157 " If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. "
158 " how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it? "
159 " since a person couldn’t exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet’s image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. "
160 " Filtering isn’t phoniness—it’s civilization. "