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.
Our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thought...
Available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a...
Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father's dick had ever gone, you'd squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you'd sucked...
You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.
Yeah, well, we're all grieving in our own way, obviously. It's just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars. He tried to meet her eyes, but she'd turned away, s...
Why I’m dolling myself up like this… You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.
When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.
What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Sti...
Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty...
Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Ind...
I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. And when the event, the big chan...
Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it n...
Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he coul...
Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that i...
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crus...
Wow, thank you so much for the compliment! Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was so selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments ma...
And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.
He was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: To feel as if he couldn’t surviv...