“So, I also quit my job,” she said when they’d eaten dinner and the wine was nearly gone. “Good for you,” her mother said. “That job never sounded worthy of your talents.” “Mom, I have no talents. I have useless intelligence. And no money. And now no place to live.”

She was still valued in larger groups, for the relative bitterness of her sarcasm, but when it came to one-on-one friendships she had trouble interesting herself in the tweets and postings and endless pictures of the happy girls, none of whom could fathom why she lived in a squatter house, and she wasn’t bitter enough for the unhappy girls, the sel

This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept.

His house had mirrored the condition of his mind, for a long time fairly orderly, then more eccentrically cluttered with things like vintage jukeboxes, and finally filled floor to ceiling with papers for his “research” and foodstuffs for a coming “siege.” His bookstore, which people had enjoyed visiting for the experience of talking to someone smar

That’s part of Wolf’s M.O.—protect the source.” “He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.” “At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.” “But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole bra

What gave her the luxury of being impossibly choosy was Pip. Over and over, she’d made it clear: Pip was the only person who passed muster, the only person she loved.

She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having had with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones. When Andreas’s hand crept, thrillingly, to the inside of her thigh, she had neither the courage

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.

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.