Sociable Quotes

“about how Taylor Swift is kind of like Amazing”
― Rebecca Harrington, Sociable: A Novel

“She wanted people to see her as beautiful and moral, warmhearted and historically correct, extremely tolerant but able to call out wrongdoing when she saw it, aware of all possible holes in her thinking, not defensive except when provoked, mildly irreverent but then unexpectedly sincere about the possibility of the American experiment. In short, she wanted to be perceived how everyone else wanted to be perceived in her small circle of digital friends. Luckily, this is one of the easier personalities in the world to pretend that you have.”
― Rebecca Harrington, Sociable: A Novel

“She was sure Ralph would make some important appearance or nonappearance. He was always coming to things and not coming to things in a way that freighted his arrival (or nonarrival) with meaning—like the titular character of a play.”
― Rebecca Harrington, Sociable: A Novel

“An important fact about Elinor that the reader should know is that even though she often felt a lot of free-floating, nonspecific anxiety, she was actually very good at blocking out specific thoughts. Here’s how it worked: An anxiety-provoking thought would surface, unbidden, in her mind, but almost as soon as it happened, a new thought would occur in its place. The new thought usually adopted the kind of positivist, instructive, and generalized tone of the personal essays Elinor read on the Internet, which gave Elinor a feeling that the new thought was better than the old thought because it was valorized by collective wisdom. Instead of worrying about Mike’s mother, and her specific idiosyncrasies or motivations, for example, Elinor would start to think about mothers in general, and how they loved their children but needed individuality. This new thought would then compete with the latent anxiety left behind by the old thought, the content of which Elinor had almost convinced herself she had forgotten.”
― Rebecca Harrington, Sociable: A Novel

“It is especially important for women to write about themselves because women's narratives have been silenced over the years, just as their labors have been ignored and their feelings shunted aside. Women weren't allowed to tell stories. So I am proud to be of a generation that gives voice to women and helps to mentor and highlight different women writes as they come along.”
― Rebecca Harrington, Sociable