The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

But I hadn’t counted on the circularity of life: the way it delivers us, with age, back to the beginning.

both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year.

therefore meaningless only until you have assigned a meaning to it.

Knowledge is power, so they say, and yet any counter will tell you that merely possessing data, in itself, is neither useful nor predictive.

quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any

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

The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me.

The moon’s brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky.

“You are bemoaning an occurrence that has not occurred. What could be more silly?”

“True,” Gregory reflected. “ ‘Poison’ is no longer toxic.” “ ‘Toxic’ isn’t toxic,” Dennis said. “ ‘Toxic’ is anodyne,” Gregory agreed. “ ‘Robust’ is limp. ‘Catalyze’ fails to react.” “The ‘silos’ and ‘buckets’ are empty,” Dennis said. “What about ‘empty’?” Gregory said. “Is ‘empty’ empty?” “ ‘Empty’ is supposed to be empty,” Dennis said. “ ‘Empty’ fails by being full.” “But does ‘empty’ convey enough emptiness?”

“I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language.”

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