“You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don’t move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my handsare dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is possible to governinnocently?”

“History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is. Why should you not use your great mind in service of what is perfectible? I ask you, my friend, to join me of your own accord in my research. If you do so, you will save yourself great anguish, and you will save me considerable trouble. Together we will advance the historian's work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean with blood.”

“Well, you're going to have to put your arms around me. Then hold on really tight. You may want to close your eyes too.""All that is for transporting?""Was there something else you'd prefer to be doing?"Fortunately, Dad intervened before I could respond to his comment. "Really, Chase? Still in the room here. That's my daughter you're flirting with. You really want to go there?”

“Lethargy. It's a word I know, because it's in one of my father's favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.”

“To hold you. To smell your hair and hope you don’t notice and think I’m some sort of psychotic. To watch the way the light moves over your skin. I want you to get chilly and sleepy and need to press your body tight to mine, and I want to wrap my arms around you. I want whatever you write in that secret book of yours about me to be worth all the other rotten shit you’re going to wind up accepting down the line.”

“Folks look around, what do you see and what do you have in your hand or in your house? Don't you ever underestimate what is in your hand or in your house, it doesn't matter how little it is.”