"Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who's also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who's enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he'll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn't regard himself as funny at all."

Lenore, come to work, where I am, remove yourself from the shower immediately and come to work now, I'll not come down for my paper until you are here, Mandible is getting suspicious when I call.

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen's impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: "We are not aroused." I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I am awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

"[...] He keeps pretending it's different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it's outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn't because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they're in-house calls. [...]"

MR. LUNGBERG: Don't quite a few people live around there?

GOVERNOR: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.

[...]

MR. OBSTAT: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.

GOVERNOR: Hits him, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept. Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil. We're going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of the state. It's going to hit home.

[...]

MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun's pretty bright here. . . . What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better.

[...] Now that it's become undeniably apparent even to me that I have a son who lends to the expression "fruit of my loins" whole new vistas of meaning [...]

[...] I recall that at this point her mechanical chair on its track was caused to move toward the door of the inner office of Dr. Jay--whose fondness for useless gadgets would, I'm convinced, be of significant interest to his colleagues--and we called goodbye. [...]

[...] I made obscene amounts of money for the House, rose to such dizzying editorial heights that my salary became almost enough to live on. [...]

[...] I'll be murdered if he knows I told. I'll end up in a thousand jars of the whipped lamb, while the little Foamwhistles ironically starve.

[...] she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit [...] Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore's conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right. She is in pain. I would like the old lady to die in her sleep.