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[...] Pip caught a glimpse of how the world must seem to Andreas: like one of those stadium crowds where every person had a colored board that they could flip in concert with everyone else and form messages. The message he was forever getting was that he was special and great. He walked into the stadium, and suddenly the sea of random bodies became the words WE LOVE YOU, MAN. Pip felt a prickle of resentment.
"A great job and a family doesn't sound so bad to me."
"You should do something better with the guts you've got."
words to live by
"There was this place," she said. "This dairy called Moonglow Dairy, near where I lived when I was growing up. I guessit was a real dairy, because they had a lot of cows, but their real money didn't come from selling milk. It came from selling high-quality manure to organic farmers. It was a shit fatory pretending to be a milk factory."
"They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.
something to think about for my YA dystopian fiction blog post
"There's this imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To think an identity you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. [...]"
[...] He put his hand on her upper thigh and left it there. Pretty much every thought she'd had in the last week had led back to one thing. She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having ad with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones. When Andreas' hand crept, thrillingly, to the inside of her thigh, she had neither the courage nor even the inclination to place a corresponding hand on his leg. The rightness of the phrase preyed upon was becoming evident. The feelings of prey in the grip of a wolf's teeth were hard to distinguish from being in love.
something to remember
[...] In her disappointment with him, she idealized the truly wealthy, attributing improbable virtues to them. She'd cashed in her youth and her looks for life in a cramped three-bedroom house with a tin-pot progressive too good and kind to be divorced, and in her rage against her stupid-innocence she found better men to admire: Goldwater, Senator Charles Percy, later Ronald Reagan. Their conservatism appealed to her German belief that nature was perfect and that all the troubles in the world were caused by man. During my school hours, she worked at the Atkinson's Drugs on Federal Boulevard, and what she saw there was diseased human beings parading to the counter where she took their scripts and gave them drugs. Human beings busily poisoning themselves with cigarettes and alcohol and junk food. They weren't to be trusted, the Soviets weren't to be trusted, and she arranged her politics accordingly.
why Clelia was a conservative
I had a sense of moral injury, of being mistaken for a worse person than I was, because I had not, in fact, materially participated in anyone's degradation. To the contrary, by stealing the magazine, I'd financially punished the bookstore for its bulk purchase of secondhand porn; I was, if anything, a virtuous recycler, and any private uses to which I then put the stolen Oui were my own business and amounted, arguably, to further punishment of the exploiters, since my reliance on stolen goods obviated any cash purchase of freshly exploitational matter, not to mention saving virgin forests from being clear-cut and pulped.
after Tom was caught with a pornographic magazine
"What are the polls showing?" [...] "Does Arne have a chance?"
"Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen," she said. [...]
"So, that's a no?" I said. "The polls aren't looking good?"
just a funny concept
inspiration for a dialogue-only chapter?
I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I'd grown up in, my father's blind progressivism, my mother's faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other's politics.
"I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations," Anabel said darkly.
"But the alternative doesn't work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that's where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It's like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house."
"[...] Start a magazine like nobody else's. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time."
"The Complicator."
basically my modus operandi. though tbh the implicit characterisation of "liberal" and "conservative" as being equally valid stances that deserve equal amounts of hole-poking is problematic