p. 7 No one has a right to complain about life because no one is compelled to endure it.
p. 31 She bought the uniform: the Nike shoes, the flimsy erotic Adidas track shorts, the heavy-duty reinforced breast sling, the long-billed sunshade, the AM/FM Walkman radio headset, and commenced to laboring up and down the streets with Eric Clapton and James Taylor bawling in her ears, the jogger's look of smug pain and spiritual fortitude on her face. Favoring her sore foot, she gulped the dust and grime and noxious gases of the passing motor traffic.
p. 103 Onward, through the scrubby woods and past a solitary winter-shaggy horse in a huge and lonely field. The field looks lonely, not the horse. Why is that?
p. 150 Nobody paid [his dad] any attention and he knew it and the knowledge made him angry and lonely and sick in his heart. Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously.
p. 181 There's two ways to be rich: (1) sweat and scheme and grovel for money and never get it anyhow; or (2) live the simple life. Sit down.
p. 258 What is the perfect robot anyhow but a properly processed human being? a soundly pussywhipped American male?
p. 301 Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it – bottomless? What is our history but a vivid and continuous dream? We skim over the roadway bearing northeast to Kansas, me and my mortal dog, and the infinite dimensions of the recent past – a mere one century – make the brain giddy, the mind reel, the heart to swoon.
p. 329 Yes, it was a good sweet job. Old Gibbsie was a good superintendent. The United States government was a government. Henry Lightcap had found his niche, his slot, his cranny, his refuge in the vast vermiculate edifice of the American socioeconomy. And he kept it too, off and on, for the next fifteen years, working five, six months a year in various national parks and national forests, through national chaos and international calamity. Brother Will might disapprove, thinking such work unworthy of a full-grown man, little better than welfare, but for Henry Lightcap – a "fool-grown man," as he liked to explain, such a part-time occupation made the ideal vocation. Henry Lightcap needed those half years free. Why? For what? For the sake of freedom itself, he told his inner critic. Liberty like virtue is its own reward, the only reward it's likely to get. And for the sake of simplicity – la vie philosophique.
p. 334 To be sexually attractive is to be perpetually on guard. A pretty girl lives in a state of constant siege. And how we loved it-the tension, the conflict, the promise of delight.
p. 435 ... and what did all that laborious reading gain him? Couldn't say. He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument – philosophy is an art form, not a science – but simply the quality of the author's mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer. And that drive also, the mania to know and understand, it too waned somewhat with the passing of years, until he found himself again alone...
p. 481 Again Henry gazed out the window. A swirl of little pale birds, like confetti, like a net of lace, exfoliated from the sky and draped themselves upon an Aleppo pine. Water sprinklers jetted in explosive circles, drenching the hospital lawns. Just plain folks walked about. The world continued, bland and blasé, while catastrophe opened beneath the one who cared.
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