quotations and passages

Even winter -- the hardest season, the most implacable -- dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned – and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbor in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.

This was perhaps the moment, which comes to so many, when Fern simultaneously matured and withered. He became more practical, as people call it; less demanding of life.

She was solitary by nature, but not monastic...and sometimes simple human contact had a way of fulfilling her when she didn't even know she needed to be fulfilled.

Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful.

'With money we could turn their own weapons against them.' I thought of that great spidery organism with its nerve ends stretching around the world, its speaking mechanisms spewing the poison of greed into every home, clamping every school kid into the lockstep make-or-break world of futile ambition. 'But,' I said, 'I wouldn’t try it now. In five years maybe. Provided we have war for that long. Provided we have heavy taxes, inflation that wipes out savings, cuts in old-age pensions, cuts in welfare payments, a few crop failures, and a very stupid government. You get all these things, plus unemployment that goes over fifteen percent and stays there for a year, and maybe you get the middle class off its ass. I’m talking about the guys who own garages, who cashier in banks, who sell office machines, the ones who bowl every Tuesday, watch football every Sunday, whose ambition is to send the kid to college or have a pool table in the basement. Given a situation where they realize the system won’t provide those things, and you’d have a revolution -- assuming the pigs don’t beat you to the punch with a major war.'

All around me the world lay like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verified.

'Fate is trying to tell you something,' Kit speculated. 'Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.'

At the time when her hope and youth and adventurousness had left her, she had believed herself cheated of those early years when nothing had happened to her, although it might have. Later still, she realized that if she had made an effort, she herself could have made things happen. But now it didn't matter. Here she was.

‘I get the idea perfectly, Mickey,’ said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

There is no armour against the arbitrariness of things. Not suspicion, not fear. There is no way to predict, divine, or escape. The only certainty is that there is no certainty. Suspicion is never enough.

Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?

'You're so exactly the way you are, the way you've always been. You never change. You never get any nicer -- and you never get any worse.'

He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery.

He had deluded himself with his ideas of humanity and liberality, but peace came after war, not out of reason. They would have to have fire and blood to make their union. So it had always been, and revolutions were made by men who conquered, or who died, and not by gray thought in gray minds. Peace came with a sword, right with a sword, justice and freedom with swords, and the struggle to them must be led by men with swords rather than by ineffectual men counseling reason and moderation.

Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

You have the glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, lack of guilt, shallow feelings, impulsiveness, and lack of realistic long-term plans that excite me right now, she says, moving even closer.