[...] The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. [...]
Rick describing Andrew Lang
"[...] I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel's strength."
just kinda funny (LaVache speaking)
"Looks like Gramma screwed up, unless perhaps the guy was dropped from a helicopter into this exact position; that's one possibility Dr. W never fathomed. I guess there wre no helicopters back in his day. Technology does affect interpretation, after all, doesn't it?"
LaVache speaking
"I thought you said the thing with John was that he was so reluctant to be in any way involved with anything's death that he usually refused to eat, since every eating entails a death. That's not anorexia."
"It is, sort of, if you think about it."
"And that he had a horizontal proof of the indisputability of the proposition that one should never kill, for whatever reason."
"A diagonal proof."
"Diagonal proof."
"I guess."
"He ... want it published, maybe?"
"I doubt he ever wrote it down, since that would involve paper, and so trees, et cetera."
"Quite a fellow. A certain nobility."
Rick and Lenore talking about her brother
"I know I'm more than a little neurotic. I know I'm possessive. I know I'm fussy and vaguely effeminate. Largely without chin, neither tall nor strong, balding badly from the center out, so that I'm forced to wear a ridiculous beret--though of course a very nice beret, too."
Rick to Lenore
"[...] I've been in a men's room with the man. Do you hear? I've been in a men's room with the man."
Rick to Lenore, on Andy
[...] Just leaving was an anonymous delivery boy, having delivered to Lenore an enormous enclosing wreath of flowers, red-and-white roses arranged in an interlocking Yin and Yang. The wreath sat atop the switchboard wastebasket, being too big to fit inside. Definitely in the wastebasket, though, was the note that had come with the flowers: "Miss Beadsman. Time grows short. One way or the other you will be part of me."
what a line
"That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting."
called "A Metamorphosis for the Eighties". just a funny idea
JAY: [...] Only a strong membrane can suck in a sperm, Lenore. Here, I know, pretend I'm a sperm.
LENORE: I don't care for the way this session is going one bit.
JAY: No, really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the ... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so ...
LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?
JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interor.
LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling in your sweatshirt-string like that?
JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.
LENORE: A sperm in a gas mask?
JAY: Batter batter.
LENORE: I demand that you set my chair in motion.
"And the writing was just so . . . This one line I remember: 'He grinned wryly.' Grinned wryly? Who grins wryly? Nobody grins wryly at all, except in stories. It wasn't real at all. It was like a story about a story. I put it on Mavis's desk with the ones about the proctologist and the snowblower."