Version Control

"And so each of the last guests sat down next to Rebecca, one at a time, to toss their confessions into the bottomless pool of her alcohol-addled mind. I shouldn't tell you this, but..."

"I already have plenty of ways to tell time." Philip said. "I usually carry a phone. And I can't help but be near a computer during most of my day. It's hard for me not to have an idea of what time it is. And Rebecca, this looks unnecessarily expensive; especially given its probable lack of accuracy relative to a quartz watch, which would have cost you next to nothing—"

"Don't you have any decency?" Alicia yelled at Rebecca. "Do you just (view spoiler)[barge in on people while they're screwing (hide spoiler)]? Are you out of your mind?"

"But most people don't want to—don't laugh—most people don't want to change the world, right? They might, you know, go out and vote or something, but for the most part they're happy to live in the world like it is. And there's nothing wrong with that. But stupid me—I have ideals."

"But he's so fucking weird, honey. He's so fucking weird."

"Science fiction," Spivey said, with faint distaste. Then: "Black woman?" 'Yeah." "I figured. Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to put a picture of a black woman on the front." He handed the book back."

"One perception that nonscientists often have {...}is that science always succeeds. And you only ever hear about the successes, so from the outside, scientific progress can look like nothing but a string of triumphs. But most people aren't aware of what an astonishing amount of failure is involved in scientific research. We screw up day after day. And the worst thing about it isn't the failure in and of itself—it's that from the point of view of the general public, or even the places where we publish, on which our careers depend, there's no point to failure. Success they're happy to hear about; failure you'd better keep to yourself. Even though failure is something you can learn from: common sense would tell you that it's almost as valuable to know what not to do as it is to get things right.
"So when we fail, which is often, the social pressures, or sometimes our own shame, can make us stay quiet. The failure becomes invisible. And the illusion that science is nothing but a series of successes is preserved."
—p.103

{...}salmon is a dish that's hard to screw up unless you have malicious intent.
—p.120

But it was so well written: it was amazing to her that she'd come so quickly to find proper grammar and spelling to be a turn-on, but here she was. Look at that properly nested series of punctuation marks after "don't hate me." That's hot. Look at that semicolon! Bradley might have been the first guy to message her who'd used a semicolon.
—p.84.

But then once she opened the text box and began to type, she looked at the wall of words she was replying to, and opted instead for five quick keystrokes of netspeak:
tl:dr
—p.89

The fact of the matter was that Carson did tend to avoid talking about race: not because he was afraid to confront certain nebulously defined truths about himself, but because he found the subject to be excruciatingly uninteresting. He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked upon him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken. And yet other people, most other people, seemed not to think that way at all: they seemed to insist that race was a thing as real as flesh.
—p.345

Which of Spivey's voices was real, and which one was performance?
—p.132

This was a good morning: she was not yet thinking about drinking.
—p.205

In the new world a woman who was blackout drunk was the rarest of beauties: how often could you have the pleasure of speaking to someone while being dead certain that they would never remember what you said? Who would pass up the chance to write history on water?
—p.335