How we cite our quotes: (Book.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
There were leopard sharks in this part of the bay, and bat rays, and jellyfish, and the occasional harbor porpoise, but she could see none of them. They were hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where, or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right. (1.10.19)
This is one of the first and few moments in The Circle when we see Mae Holland demonstrating a bit of wisdom for once. Her sense of the "rightness" of not being able to know everything about the watery world underneath her kayak stands in sharp contrast to Eamon Bailey's assumption that the Circle's technologies will allow human beings to "become all-seeing, all-knowing" (1.8.85-87).
Quote #5
"I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication." (1.19.55)
Of all of The Circle's characters, Mercer Medeiros is the one who is used most often to express the novel's own authorial perspective. According to Mercer, many of the Circle's tools aren't generating knowledge at all—instead, they're simply making it seem as though gossip, hearsay, and conjecture are the same things as truth.
Quote #6
"What'd they look like?" the man asked, and when Mae described them, the grey glassine heads, the man glanced to the woman. "Stevie and Kevin."
The woman nodded in recognition.
"I think the others are further out today, hunting. Stevie and Kevin don't leave this part of the bay too often. They come here all the time to say hello." (1.21.54-56)
The anonymous couple Mae Holland finds floating in a ramshackle houseboat on the San Francisco Bay demonstrate a kind of genuine knowledge that few other characters in The Circle have access to. This couple has made a point of getting to know their surroundings in a personal, organic way. They can differentiate between the harbor seals that they see day after day, and they don't need an app to do it.