Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

Their theory was that the technology-driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products.

Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don’t fall behind with email.

I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.

“I’m looking for some other way to be,” he said seriously. “I don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s different.

Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning?

The leading occupational hazard of Leila’s job was sources who wanted to be friends with her.

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them.

When Leila, under the spell of All the President’s Men, declared her ambition to be an investigative reporter, her father replied that journalism was a male business and that she should therefore go into it, to show what a Helou woman was capable of.

He said that America was a butter the hot knife of her mind was made to cut through, America the place where a woman didn’t have to live like Marie, on a cousin’s charity.

Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you’re out in the field. Your source makes some offhand remark, and suddenly you see the real story. That’s when I feel most alive. When I’m sitting at the computer, I’m only half alive.

Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive.

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 needs a witness.

She wasn’t mad for him, but she was curious, sexually botherated, and increasingly resolute.

I got physical attention exclusively from very short girls and queer guys. One of the latter had walked up to me at a party and, without a word, put his tongue in my ear.

As working journalists in a student body doing frivolous student things, my friends and I achieved levels of self-importance that I wouldn’t encounter again until I met people from the New York Times.

she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.

She wasn’t fat, but she was getting a little Moosewoody in the face and thighs.

“It’s good to talk about things,” I said. He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.” We were in territory familiar to a journalist. Sources who bothered to allude to stories they couldn’t tell me almost always ended up telling them. The important thing was to talk about anything that wasn’t the untold story.

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he’d been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man’s burden.

it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.

Pip nodded, but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?