Use Well Thy Freedom.

It's Not Surprising To See In My Own Work, Looking Back, And In The Work Of Some Of My Peers, An Attention To Family. It's Nice To Write A Book That Does Tend Toward Significance And Meaning, And Where Else Are You Sure Of Finding It?

Here Was A Torture That Greek Inventors Of The Feast And The Stone Had Omitted From Their Hades: The Blanket Of Self-deception. A Lovely Warm Blanket As Far As It Covered The Soul In Torment, But It Never Quite Covered Everything.

Even In An Intensely Mediated World, In A World That Offers At Least The Illusion Of Radical Self-invention And Radical Freedom Of Choice, I As A Novelist Am Drawn To The Things You Can't Get Away From. Because Much Of The Promise Of Radical Self-invention, Of Defining Yourself Through This Marvelous Freedom Of Choice, It's Just A Lie. It's A Lie That We All Buy Into, Because It Helps The Economy Run.

Since Our Technology Is Really Just An Extension Of Ourselves, We Don’t Have To Have Contempt For Its Manipulability In The Way We Might With Actual People. It’s All One Big Endless Loop. We Like The Mirror And The Mirror Likes Us. To Friend A Person Is Merely To Include The Person In Our Private Hall Of Flattering Mirrors.

Family's The One Thing You Can't Change. You Can Cover Yourself With Tattoos. You Can Get A Grapefruit-sized Ring Going Through Your Earlobe. You Can Change Your Name. You Can Move To A Different Continent. But You Cannot Change Who Your Parents Were, And Who Your Siblings Are, And Who Your Children Are.