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Kayaking
During one kayaking trip, Mae Holland passes by an elderly couple who are sitting in a boat, drinking wine, and reminiscing about the past. The elderly couple seems to symbolize the “old way of life,” which the Circle is slowly killing: a life characterized by ordinariness, simplicity, and person-to-person connection. As such, the elderly couple is a kind of Rorschach test for how one feels about life lived outside of social networking: envy of the couple’s life reflects skepticism of the Circle, and disdain for their life indicates an alignment with the Circle’s goals.
The Elderly Couple Quotes in The Circle
The The Circle quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Elderly Couple. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Book One, part 5
Quotes
"'Were you here when that burned?" the man asked, pointing to a large uninhabited island in the middle of the bay. It rose, mute and black, behind them. Mae shook her head.
‘It burned for two days. We had just gotten here' At night, the heat—you could feel it even here. We swam every night in this godforsaken water, just to stay cool. We thought the world was ending."
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Book Two, part 3
Quotes
Mae pictured all this. She pictured the Circle being taken apart, sold off amid scandal, thirteen thousand people out of jobs, the campus overtaken, broken up, turned into a college or mall or something worse. And finally she pictured life on a boat with this man, sailing the world, untethered, but when she tried to, she saw, instead, the couple on the barge she'd met months ago on the bay. Out there, alone, living under a tarp, drinking wine from paper cups, naming seals, reminiscing about island fires.
At that moment, Mae knew what she needed to do.
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The Elderly Couple Symbol Timeline in The Circle
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Elderly Couple appears in The Circle. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book One, part 5
Mae kayaks out to a distant fishing boat, where she finds an elderly couple sitting down to have a cocktail. A woman invites Mae to join them for a...
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...she needs to return her kayak in eight minutes. She says her goodbyes to the elderly couple and paddles back to Walt. During her trip back, she realizes that she’s been blissfully...
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Book One, part 7
...and the boat passes by. Then, she rows out to the abandoned island that the elderly couple told her about. On the island, she imagines the animals that must live there and...
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Book Two, part 3
...a boat with Ty, and, for some reason, all she can think about is the elderly couple she met while kayaking. She thinks of how they spent their time drinking wine and...
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