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[...] In the girls' faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering behind the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fingernails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. [...] The boys [...] I see so many calm, impassive, and cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts [...]
Rick at Amherst
[...] as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d'oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva on it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin's nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d'oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, "Guess you know it's true," and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her hose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.
Amazing. Fits in so well with Rick's characterization. Reminds me of Tom in Purity
[...] 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