How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Didn't you say the house alone probably cost a million dollars? Al?""It's a large house but cheaply done," Alfred said with a sudden vigor. "The walls are like paper"
"All the new houses are like that," Enid said (2.74-76)
While modern America boasts technological wonders, it seems like that knowledge is used to make things cheaper—not better. Sure, that new McMansion might be look pretty, but peek behind the curtains and you'll find shoddy craftsmanship and poor design.
Quote #2
If the great Materialist Order of technology and consumer appetite and medical science really was improving the lives of the formerly oppressed [...] then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to his criticism. It was all, in Melissa's word, bulls***. (2.278)
Chip—like his father—isn't fond of what the modern world has to offer. It would be a huge blow to his ego to admit that he was wrong the whole time.
Quote #3
What survived of the Midpac's truck lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144-strand fiber-optic system lay buried in the railroad's old right-of-way. (3.211)
The Midpac represents a time in history when you couldn't send someone a text message in an instant—fancy that. Now that the moment has passed, this formerly illustrious company is forced to imprison Americans and serve caffeine addicts to make ends meet.
Quote #4
"But the fact is, a one-hundred-percent voluntary alternative to incarceration is the opposite of cruel and unusual. Of all the potential application of Correcktall this is the most humane. This is the liberal vision: genuine, permanent, voluntary self-melioration." (3.759)
There are many people who would whole-heatedly agree with this statement today. To be honest, though, it's a little frightening to us to imagine anyone having this much control over other people's lives.
Quote #5
Between the Four Seasons and the neighboring office tower was a corporate courtyard so lavishly planted and flawlessly maintained that it might have been pixels in a cybershopping paradise. (3.810)
This passage raises an interesting question: Why bother with the messy real world when you can have a perfect digital imitation?
Quote #6
City people had no right to patronize the iron horse. They didn't know it intimately, as Alfred did. They hadn't fallen in love with it out in the northwest corner of Kansas where it was the only link to the greater world, as Alfred had. (4.165)
This is the reason Alfred loves railroads so much. That being said, it's worth remembering that the railroad itself was a mind-blowing technological innovation in its day.
Quote #7
Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehensions. "I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?"
"Well, yes, of course." Mr. Söderblad said. "At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don't you think?" (4.600-601)
We see this sentiment from non-American characters throughout the novel. After America ceased to be a major industrial power, it starts exporting something much more valuable—American culture.
Quote #8
She was sixty-five and she'd never seen a scene like this. She'd fashioned images all her life and she'd never appreciated their mystery. Now here it was. All this commerce in bit and bytes, these ones and zeroes streaming through servers at some Midwestern university. (4.693)
While the Internet allows us to see anything we want whenever we want to, it has a tendency to demystify the actual thing being portrayed.
Quote #9
The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling (5.908)
We promise we'd never do anything like this, folks. But, if we're honest, the only thing that prevents us from doing so is our own personal ethics. Keep that in mind next time you see an unfounded rumor floating around Twitter.
Quote #10
So a country whose citizens, like so many of their Western counterparts, had simply disconnected their copper-wire telephones when cell phones became cheap and universal was plunged into a communications silence of nineteenth-century proportions. (5.973)
Here's the serious downside to the cloud-based world we currently reside in: All it takes is one flipped switch for the whole system to crash. Now excuse us while we go back-up everything we own.