" ... nightmare vision of our nation's vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine."

"No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it ... Probably it cannot: who to the dedicated to Virtue, offer in reward only cold and odorless and tasteless virtue: as compared not only to the bright rewards of sin and pleasure but to the ever watchful unflagging omniprescient skill -- that incredible matchless capacity for invention and imagination -- with which even the tottering footsteps of infancy are steadily and firmly guided into the primrose path."

"I said, and I believed it (I know I believed it because I have said it a thousand times since and I still believe it and I hope to say it a thousand times more in my life and I defy anyone to say I will not believe it) I will never lie again."

"And more: that he wanted me to do that, was silently begging me to do that; he and I both aghast not at his individual temerity but at our mutual, our confederated recklessness, and that Boon knew he had not the strength to resist his and so much cast himself on my strength and rectitude."

"Because you should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or footpad. I was just eleven, remember. There are things, circumstances, conditions in the world which should not be there but are, and you cant escape them and indeed, you would not escape them even if you had the choice, since they too are a part of Motion, of participating in life, being alive. But they should arrive with grace, decency."

"So maybe there are after all other things besides just Poverty and Non-virtue who look after their own."

" ... hating all of us for being the poor frail victims of being alive, having to be alive ... "

" ... there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape the cold and in winter to escape the heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social -- not economic: social -- desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)"

" 'Don't lie to me,' Grandfather said. 'Horses dont eat sardines.' "