[...] the expression in Cheryl Ann's eyes, which without ever once again thinking about it Tom Bondurant has never forgotten, was one of blank terminal sadness, not so much that of a pheasant in a dog's jaws as of a person who's about to transfer something he knows in advance he can never get sufficient return on. [...]

Under the sign erected every May above the outer highway reading IT'S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY and through the north ingress with its own defaced name and signs addressed to soliciting and speed and universal glyph for children at play [...] and then hard left along the length of a speed bump into the dense copse [...] along the north park's anfractuous roads [...] skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said the man left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed them all as they watched Dragnet and the torn abandoned sixteen-wide half overgrown by the edge of the copse where boys and their girls made strange agnate forms on pallets [...]

For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat. The worst thing was that one degree could lead to the next if he worried about it too much, if he was too afraid that a single sweat would get worse and tried too hard to control or avoid it. The fear of it could bring it on. He did not truly begin to suffer until he understood this fact, an understanding he came to slowly at first and then all of an awful sudden.

[...] He would mentally repeat this to himself over and over. Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn't help--knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn't make the fear go away. In fact, he started to think that thinking of the speech's line so much just made him all the more afraid of the fear itself. That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird. [...]

[...] If the examiner looks at the documentarian instead of the camera, it can appear evasive or coerced. It's not optimal, and the prebriefer's advice is to look into the camera as one would a trusted friend's eyes, or a mirror, depending.

[...] as long as he's screaming and trying to beat himself unconscious against the wall of the room, they're going to keep him in that little room, and as long as he's in that little room, he's going to be screaming, because the whole problem is that he's a claustrophobic. He's a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone's going to be in living hell.

[...] Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he'd have to go into a stall in a men's room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.

'[...] given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going t be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday--'

'Anybody got the time? How long we been in here, three hours?'

'And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, [...]'

[...] I'm 99 per cent sure that I took just one Intro Accounting class during all this time, and did all right in it until we hit depreciation schedules, as in the straight-line method vs. accelerated depreciation schedules, and the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative, especially after i'd missed a couple of the classes and fallen behind, which with depreciation is fatal--

[...] I remember not getting Camus's The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm--in other words, I was cheating, at least by implication--but not feeling much about it one way or the other, that I can recall, except a sort of cynical, disgusted relief when the prof's grader wrote something like 'Interesting in places!' under the B. Meaning a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit. [...]