"Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape."

"People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate."

"Then he got more books. He saved all the books."

"You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?"

"I want to be seen. I want proof I existed."

"You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit."

"He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline 'The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.' Mae scanned it, catching passages: 'We must all have the right to anonymity.' 'Not every human activity can be measured.' 'The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding.' 'The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable.' At the end she found one line, written in red ink: 'We must all have the right to disappear."

"His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?"

"You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that's the same as going there."

"You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher."

"We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day."

"If you don't have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take apart all the little things. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Building by building. Family by family."

"I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them."

"But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV."

"So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they'd work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it."

"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."

"You still know that boy. He was very angry at fourteen, fifteen, in summer and winter, at home or in the world. So angry that his face contorted in photos. The camera was a question and his face did not know the answer."

"I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy."

"How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting."

"When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework."

"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to."

"But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia."

"Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this."

"She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite."

"Why do you want to be on The Real World?-Because I want everyone to witness my youthWhy?-Isn't it gorgeous?"

"This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality."

"I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'."

"The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard."

"We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake."

"You don't know what it's like to be a man over thirty who's never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening."

"You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time."

"Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion."

"Yousef had been lighthearted during his questions, but there was something very serious and sad under his smile, and Alan knew what it was. It was the knowledge that there would be no fighting, and there would be no struggle, no stand taken, and that the two of them, because they were not lacking materially, because despite injustices in their countries they were the recipients of preposterous bounty, would likely do nothing. They were content, they had won. The fighting would be done by others, elsewhere."

"I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway."

"And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students."

"How lame this is, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting."

"I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost."

"McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object."

"Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. 'All this. The fucking shark that eats the world."

"I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things."

"It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it."

"Always we learn things and then we forget them."

"There's less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank, Bailey said. 'They'll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark's."

"You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me."

"I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network."

"Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic."

"His lies were so exquisite I almost wept."

"Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery."

"People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange."

"Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get."