“Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captured after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

“People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.”

“It's been one nightmare after another, Christina thought. Pretty soon I won't be able to keep track of them all.”

“Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.”

“Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.”

“Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.”