“It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery - or other measurable thins. Every person had a clearly defined part to play - as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of awful truth.”

“Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.”

“Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.”

“But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say. But Billy didn't really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.”

“Most white people in Midland City were insecurewhen they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their wordssimple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum.Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.This was because their English teachers would wince and cover theirears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed tospeak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: theywere told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language ifthey couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and poemsand plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.The black people would not put up with this. They went on talkingEnglish every which way. They refused to read books they couldn’tunderstand—on the grounds they couldn’t understand them. Theywould ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no Taleof Two Cities? Whuffo?”