The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.

Economics is closer to religion than science.

In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.

Sure...the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meanwhile the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work.

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only ‘tolerate’ what you can’t stand.

Yet what best protected privacy wasn’t concealment but apathy—the fact that other people simply weren’t interested.

The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown

The concept of duty was foreign to her, and it was only the people who acknowledged duty, and who had regard for duty, who got saddled with

Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.

Yet what best protected privacy wasn't concealment but apathy - the fact that other people simply weren't interested.

Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned.

Real poverty is about doing what you have to do as opposed to what you want.

Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don’t, and from the young to the old—which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you’ve only managed a new unfairness.

Eventually, social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half.

In teoria il vecchio era di fede progressista, ma Florence non aveva mai conosciuto gente danarosa che fosse priva di istinti conservatori. Uno di questi era far apparire terribilmente complesso tutto ciò che era moralmente ovvio (benché svantaggioso a livello finanziario).

You always imagine you’ll savor these icon-cum-nemeses’ undoing. You’re always wrong.

would have been the same had they whisked her to the hospital the moment the finger began to swell. “Drugs that don’t work,” the internist announced forlornly, delivering the respectfully folded bandana like a miniature American flag at a military funeral, “don’t work early any better than they work late.” Meantime, Nollie did jumping jacks beside the car, earning no end of rubbernecking hilarity from passing locals. Willing would never have called it to her attention, but her form had decayed. Her hands no longer met overhead, but rose only as high as her ears, then descended to the level of her waist. The result was a weak, dying-butterfly motion.

Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.

Cheating,' Nollie agreed, 'is restorative. It maintains your dignity. Breaking a rule a day keeps the doctor away far better than a fucking apple.

What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?

Money is emotional,” Lowell pronounced. “Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth.

Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.

Jarred had started out a radical environmentalist, a position only ninety degrees from survivalist. With one small last adjustment in the same direction, he transformed to libertarian gun nut.

Money is worth what people feel it’s worth. . . . Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper.

He appeared to believe that because the university owed him his salary, it would ipso facto pay his salary, in a confusion of should and will that bordered on dyslexic.

I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say.