“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?”

“... I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown.- Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.- Wine of the country, says he.- What's yours? says Joe.- Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.- Three pints, Terry,...”

“He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgre...”

“Pregnancy is a natural event, but you lessen the chances conception can occur with an unnatural diet.”

“When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monolo...”

“Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreov...”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”