Quotable Quotes: The New Yorker (01-18-10)

• Olson's team will argue that marriage is a malleable institution, shaped by shifting notions of gender, race, and property, while sexual orientation is innate. And the defendants will likely argue that marriage is immutable, and sexual orientation is a performative act, a chosen identity.

• "You gotta help me stop looking up stuff I don't actually care about."

• Children (and cool grownups) of the eighties remember a brightly lit room with fifties wallpaper, whose inhabitants included a talking chair (Chairry), a talking clock (Clocky), a talking globe who sounded like Henry Kissinger (Globey), a window with goodly eyes (Mr. Window), a blue genie head in a bejeweled box (Jambi), a cow in a tiara (the Cowntess), and a robot (Conky) who dispensed a daily "secret word," which, when it was spoken, would make all of the above scream real loud.

• It was at this point that I decided to kill him. After all, would the world really mist this fatuous little suppository, with his preening self-confidence and emetic cuteness?
  

• Our ability to take any pleasure, or even interest, in shows like this - in which participants are depicted as energetic but essentially aimless, oblivious of their own deficits, and delusional about their attractiveness and their importance in the world - hinges not on our ability to identify with them but on our ability to distinguish ourselves from them. Unless the show manages to make us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees, it hasn't done its job.

• "In an effort to be more transparent, I've grown back my evil goatee."
  

• "A question that so evenly but intensely divides the country is not one that should be decided by the courts nationwide," Eskridge said. "It's the mirror image of the mistake the Bush Administration made by trying to introduce a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman."

• [H]e's not just a social grub but a raving paranoid, endlessly mouthing something about attempted homicide by a Hereford.

• We seem to have been cursed with a new kind of film: the brown-and-white movie. What's so appealing to filmmakers about these post-apocalyptic tales, anyway? In the past decade or so, the world has been meteored, quaked, lavaed, nuked, melted, frozen, Godzilled, and repeatedly turned into New Jersey or New Mexico.

• Iraq is clearly not an easy place to write a novel these days.

• They're a few minutes' walk from the ocean, yet we've never seen them go swimming - they just slop around in their rooftop Jacuzzi, whose presence is so central to the men's seduction ritual that it's practically a character in the show.