“...her self-imposed sentence of unadulterated good-listenership had been fully served.”
“That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.”
“Hell had been his Vietnam. It had stamped its mark on him for all eternity, and no amount of denial or self-imposed ignorance was going to change it. Ever.”
“Pessimism is a luxury of good times. In difficult times, pessimism is a self- fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence.”
“She described to us six lanes' worth of unadulterated fear, populated exclusively by motorists whose driving education had been paid for by the blood of pedestrians.”
“It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.”