Quotes by Dave Eggers, The Circle

“Theres less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank, Bailey said. Theyll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the sharks.”

“This was a new skill she'd acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.”

“Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.”

“I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didnt picture a world ...”

“Director of Ensuring the Future”

“Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.”

“Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.”

“Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.”

“This democracy thing, or Demoxie, whatever it is, good god. Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.”

“I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.”

“Here though, there are no oppressors. No one's forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basi...”

“He handed Mae a piece of paper, on which he'd written, in crude all capitals, a list of assertions under the headline "The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age." Mae scanned it, catching passages: "We...”

“Surveillance shouldn't be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.”

“For a moment, she thought it natural in a way seeing a plane fall from the sky can seem natural, too. The horror comes later.”

“Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.”

“Why shouldnt your curiosity about the world be rewarded?”

“So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not theyd work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the pu...”

“Thats whats new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now thats over. Completion is the end. Were closing the circle around everyoneits a totalitarian nightmare.”

“If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you're helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joy...”

“You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think thats the same as going there.”