"One thing we knew for certain- despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment."
- Joshua Ferris
"For all our penny-wisdom,’” he said, “‘for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts."
"We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed..."
"I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer."
"I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism b..."
"People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and ..."
"She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companio..."
"I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the cl..."
"I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrativ..."
"It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact. Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was ..."