111
" The only people who remained there after the exodus that night were an assortment of lost, unclaimed souls. There was a boy from Iran who appeared very sad, his eyelashes clustered together in little wet starbursts. He sat in a chair in a corner of the first-floor lounge with his computer on his lap, gazing at it mournfully. When Greer entered the lounge—her room, a rare single, was too depressing to stay in all evening, and she’d been unable to concentrate on her book—she was startled to realize that he was merely looking at his screen saver, which was a picture of his parents and sister, all of them smiling at him from far away. The family image swept across the computer screen and gently bounced against one side, before slowly heading back "
― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion
115
" The Ryland website showed a few nominal photos of students in goggles doing something with a torch in a laboratory, or squinting over a whiteboard jammed with calculations, but the rest of the photos were social, cornball: an afternoon of ice skating on a frozen pond, a classic “three in a tree” shot of students chatting beneath a spreading oak. In fact, the campus only had one such tree, which had been over-photographed into exhaustion. In daylight, students straggled to class along the paths of the inelegant campus, occasionally even wearing pajamas, like the members of a good-natured bear family in a children’s book "
― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion