The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

“To hell with God,” Fern said. “I’m worried about the Internet.” “By which you mean an all-seeing, all-knowing entity that may be predicting and controlling your behavior, even when you think you’re choosing for yourself?”

If he couldn’t search or retrieve or view his own past, then it wasn’t really his. It was lost.

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.

we hurl math at time in the vain hope of understanding it.

Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

She struggles to believe that Piers is as real as she is—as full of thoughts and memories and feelings.

Hindsight creates an illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment. It’s easier to believe in a foregone conclusion than to accept that our lives are governed by random chance.

Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.

Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.