“I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended”

“I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both.”

“The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.”

“There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.”

“Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions.”

“I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue.”

“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”