What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.