Page 3 - A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls or cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
Page 12 - The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you will yourself to not.
Page 14 - Above and below were a different story, but there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all. It just got really foggy.
Page 15 - Sylvanshine had once been on a first date with a Xerox rep who had complex and slightly repulsive patterns of callus on her fingers from playing the banjo semi-professionally as her off-time passion; [...] and he'd been so nervous and tense that he'd yammered on and on about himself and never asked her sufficiently about herself, her history with the banjo and what it meant to her, which was why she hadn't liked him enough and they hadn't connected. He'd never given the woman with the banjo a chance, he saw now. That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.
Page 37 - The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeved down and she always smelled very good and clean, like something you could trust and deeply care about even if you weren't in love.
Page 85 - Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly and with our full attention.[...] I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
Page 94-95 - It was by far the worst feeling he had ever had in his life, and the whole attack lasted almost forty minutes, and for the rest of the day he went around in a kind of trance of shock and spent adrenaline, and that day was the actual start of the syndrome in which he understood that the worse his fear of breaking into a shattering public sweat was, the better the chances that he'd have something like what happened in World Cultures happen again, maybe every day, maybe more than once a day - and this understanding caused him more terror and frustration and inner suffering than he had ever before even dreamed that somebody could ever experience, and the total stupidity and weirdness of the whole problem just made it that much worse. [...] To raise your hand in class and ask for a bathroom pass as heads turned to look - just the thought of it filled him with total dread.
Page 130/135/136/137 - American are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens - parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilites. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.
[...]
With the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we've ceded to it. [...]
It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responibilities to use and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
[...]
What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are direct paractical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.
Page 173 - He looked good in a suit - like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit.
Page 182 - If you really look at something, you can almost tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
Page 202 - Given that many of the people were also holding numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of the these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways above the widening gap as shoppers jettisoned their purchases in an attempt to leap clear of my father's path, so that part of the appearance of the gap was the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods.
Page 217 - He was getting his materials out and arranging them, looking down at his desktop with a little formal smile. What he was actually doing was the teacherly thing of acknowledging the roomful of students without looking at them.
Page 219 - ...and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying to too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentations had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense,' and why it was a term of approval.
Page 222 - The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later - the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time.
Page 229/230/232 - Welcome to the world of reality - there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth - acutal heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. [...] True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care - with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. [...] In fact, the less conventionally heroic or exciting or adverting or even interesting or engaging a labor appears to be, the greater its potential as an arena for actual heroism, and therefore as a denomination of joy unequaled by any you can yet imagine. [...] The heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made - the contest is now in the slicing.
Page 240 - I can remember that a few corners' stop signs had only the polygonal sign portion visible about the drifts, and several storefronts' doors had their mail slots frozen open and long tongues of windblown snow on the carpet.
Page 255 - The school smelled of adhesive paste, rubber boots, sour cafeteria foos, and a warm biotic odor of many bodies and the fixative of the tile floor as three hundred mammals slowly warmed the rooms throughout the day.
Page 292 - their eyes had passed over all the words on the page without actually having read them at all - with read here meaning internalized, comprehended, or whatever we mean by really reading vs. simply having one's eyes pass over symbols in a certain order.
Page 408 - Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and who know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?
Page 475 - Why not just ask the question instead of taking the time to make me say yes you can ask a question?
Page 546 - Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
