[...] Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. [...] 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.

"[...] Shining his pure light on a world full of corruption. Lecturing other men on their sexism. It's like he wants there to be a world full of women and only one man who understands them. I know that kind of guy. They give me the creeps."

With the exception of a beautiful gay male Swede, Anders, who had some journalism chops and wrote the digests of the Project's leaks, the division of labor by gender was perfect. The boys went to a windowless and heavily secured building beyond the goat pasture and wrote code there, while the girls hung out in the refurbished barn and did community development and PR and search-engine optimization, source verification and liaising, website and bookkeeping chores, research and social media and copywriting.

Pip was seeing Annagret in a new and sadder light, as a middle-aged person inflating her importance to the Project, playing up her past importance to Andreas, remaining loyal after being discarded.

[...] 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."

"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.

"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.