“He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.”

“What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.”

“What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.”

“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.”

“What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms...She followed him to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn't abuse her because she tended to take his side - he wanted no mediator between us.”

“His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”