p. 89 Don't you know how we lose the sense of our own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us? These people here have so little conception of our world that sometimes I feel myself as if I must have dreamed it.
p. 133 Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history: we need it to know what real injustice looked like.
p. 191 He was indulgent and paternal; she could see that every move she made and every word she spoke fascinated him.
p. 229 "How does one guarantee the probity of government science?" King said.... "It's quite simple," he said to Mrs. Jackson. "You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain."
p. 238 As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.
p. 243 Grandmother wanted her son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole.
p. 246 I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
p. 247 [The modern generation's] circuitry seems to have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
p. 251 What stretched unbroken from her great-great-grandfather, who had built this house, to her father, who would die in it, was cut short in her. The book about her grandfather that she had begun in affectionate memory was really a sort of epitaph.
p. 284 One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism - not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.
p. 340 I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull.
p. 352 No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked.
p. 375 1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will click and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.
p. 395 Forgiving I have considered, although like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can't help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary.
p. 423 ...Bancroft's advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.
p. 452 There is a Japanese story called Insects of Various Kinds in which a spider trapped between the sliding panes of a window lies there inert, motionless, apparently lifeless, for many months, and then in spring, when a maid moves the window for a few seconds to clean it, springs once and is gone. Did Ellen Ward live that sort of trapped life? Released by the first inadvertent opportunity, was she? Seduced because she was waiting for the chance to be?
p. 456 [begins Chapter 6 - an amazing chapter about why communes and utopias fail - reread it]
p. 458 Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly's crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she's a long way from wise.
p. 467 How do I know what you should do? You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
p. 509 I am not so silly as to believe that what I dream about other people represents some sort of veiled or occult truth about them, but neither am I so stupid as to reject the fact that it represents some occult truth about me.
p. 510 ...[the angle of repose] is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
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