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21 " It's not your job to be *pre-disappointed* for him, dig? You...go on and on about how big and terrible 'the world' is. Well, maybe so. But in that case, it's the world's job to be big and terrible, not yours. "
― Lionel Shriver , Big Brother
22 " Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat "
23 " Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn't? "
24 " I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay. "
25 " I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with the forlorn 'Well so-- what's next? "
26 " Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu. "
27 " I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch. "
28 " This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. "
29 " This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that “feeling special” was a private experience, and no one else’s projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. "
30 " This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body. "
31 " I backed off. Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else's business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother. Whenever he ate rich or sweet things around me I got agitated, no less so than if he'd carved himself with a razor blade in plain view. "
32 " The eerie disposition between player and piano put me in mind of Schroeder, banging out Beethoven on a toy. "
33 " If I were that big a load, I'd be depressed, too".That was the chicken-and-egg question I'd not been able to parse. Was Edison fat because he was depressed, or depressed because he was fat?"He really thrives on how nice Cody is to him," I said. "I don't think most people are very nice. I've seen it, when we're out and about. The looks. As if he's--doing something to them, as if he's an affront. The worst is in the supermarket. With the mounded cart. I feel like I'm surrounded by a giant eye roll. "