p. 10 Enid looked at the chair. Her expression was merely pained, no more. "I never liked that chair." This was probably the most terrible thing she could have said to Alfred. The chair was the only sign he'd ever given of having a personal vision of the future. Enid's words filled him with such sorrow - he felt such pity for the chair, such solidarity with it, such astonished grief at its betrayal - that he pulled off the dropcloth and sank into its arms and fell asleep. (It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.)
p. 11 He turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. He began a sentence: "I am-" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seem as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness...
p. 18 [His mother] had always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at here ha had no idea what she really looked like.
p. 69 But Denise left the kitchen an took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip's living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; an no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip's living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer on new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world...
p. 96 To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing.
p. 163 "You've gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other things we've gotten you. Things you also said you were 'very interested in' at the time." "This is different," Caleb pleaded. "This time I'm really, truly interested." Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to buy his father's acquiescence.
p. 186 What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic and egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed.
p. 259 It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions...
p. 263 If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.
p. 276 There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.
p. 279 And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled - the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor - refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.
p. 283 Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal - sight would be its soul.
p. 326 "And Ted's right on top of that, he things our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it's out of control, it's not computers that are making everything virtual, it's mental health. Everyone's trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, is what Ted says. We've bumped up to the next level of abstraction because we have too much time and money, is whet he says, and he refuses to be a part of it."
p. 351 The protective sky was thinner in this country of northern water [off the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula]. Clouds ran in packs resembling furrows in a field, gliding along beneath the sky's enclosing dome, which was noticeably low. One approached Ultima Thule here. Green objects had red coronas. In the forests that stretched west to the limit of visibility, as in the purposeless rushing of the clouds, as in the air's supernal clarity, there was nothing local.
p. 477 The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break.
p. 555 As she left her parents' neighborhood [on foot in the frigid winter night], the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one [Christmas Eve], was a good hour for staring at a screen.
p. 555 She'd never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
p. 571 And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. the tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body - softer, more mortal and organic - than like a building.
p. 600 She had to tell him [her husband in the depths of Alzheimer's whom she visited every day], while she still had time, how wrong he'd been and how right she'd been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day. Even if he wouldn't listen, she had to tell him.
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