Sublime

“Maybe we shouldn’t do that,” Jordi said. “Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn’t have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn’t we be normalizing change?”

‘Children used to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along. But now we hope it can simply be us.’

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

The perfect sheets, the chilly rooms: they were stupid things, taken one by one, but all together they were a convincing substitute for a life.

1. On the individual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs? 2. On social and economic levels, what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs? 3. On the cultural and political levels, why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anyt

She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.

For so long, she could see now, she had made her daughter live by her whim: moving on anytime she needed new ideas; anytime she had felt stuck or uneasy.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must