82 Quotes About City-on-fire

It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what they wanted.

I don't have anything against therapy, by the way; it's great for other people. It's just that, personally, I see the enterprise as proceeding from the same premises that cause the problems it seeks to treat. For you guys, what I am, fundamentally, is a closed system, a container of ego and id and biological imperatives. That I'm not may be a fiction, but if I can't imagine a reference point larger than myself, morally speaking, then what's the use?

Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone?

Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?

He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don't want to get through.

The cushions of my friend's couch were some kind of rubberized velour, the windows were uncurtained, and at five a.m. the birds were all atwitter and the light, the L.A. light everyone goes on and on about, was right in my East Coast eyes. Give me New York any day, I thought. But when New York came, it was with fangs and claws, in a nightmare I now woke from screaming.

Daddy just repeated the word, internship. As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were perfectly calculated to jam his circuits. Well, you know, we've already booked you a seat on the first manned spaceflight, but I suppose if you have an internship . . .

William loathed his family,' Mercer said. 'With cause.

For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them, and connecting them to still others. People he hadn't even met.