How we cite our quotes: (Book.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
There wasn't any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness. (Epigraph)
This passage comes from John Steinbeck's epic novel East of Eden, but Dave Eggers gives it to us secondhand by presenting it as The Circle's epigraph. By giving a nod to Steinbeck's sweeping study of Californian settlers breaking ground at the turn of the 20th century, Eggers reminds us that our generation isn't the first to believe that technological progress can create a heaven on earth.
Quote #2
The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. […] Amid all this was a workplace, too, four hundred acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. (1.1.2)
To Mae Holland, the Circle's main campus in San Vincenzo, California, may as well be the center of the universe. From her point of view, it's certainly the pinnacle of all that's pure and innovative and progressive in the world. This tiny little corner of America is a utopia, and it's going to grow and envelop the whole world if Mae has anything to say about it.
Quote #3
After six or so years of loathing her hometown, of cursing her parents for moving there and subjecting her to it, its limitations and scarcity of everything—diversion, restaurants, enlightened minds—Mae had recently come to remember Longfield with something like tenderness. It was a small town between Fresno and Tranquility, incorporated and named by a literal-minded farmer in 1866. One hundred and fifty years later, its population had peaked at just under two thousand souls, most of them working in Fresno, twenty miles away. (1.2.2)
Although The Circle doesn't dwell at length on this theme, the novel definitely taps into the age-old conflicts between the rural and urban in America.