Monday, March 28, 2016
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 274
"How strange," Juliana said. "I never would have thought the truth would make you angry." Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I'm lucky.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 268
"Everyone has—technical secrets. You have yours; I have mine. You should read my book and accept it on face value, just as I accept what I see—" Again he pointed at her with his glass. "Without inquiring if it's genuine underneath, there, or done with wires and staves and foam-rubber padding. Isn't that part of trusting in the nature of people and what you see in general?"
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 260
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 254
Inner Truth. Pigs and fishes are least intelligent of all; hard to convince. It is I. The book means me. I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me?
I will wait. I will see. Which it is.
Perhaps it is both.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 243
But I do not have to wait for death, for the decomposition of my animus as it wanders in search of a new womb. All the terrifying and beneficent deities; we will bypass them, and the smoky lights as well. And the couples in coitus. Everything except this light. I am ready to face without terror. Notice I do not blench.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 243
Now talk to me, he told it. Now that you have snared me. I want to hear your voice issuing from the blinding clear white light.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 242
Metal is from the earth, he thought as he scrutinized. From below: from that realm which is the lowest, the most dense. Land of trolls and caves, dank, always dark. Yin world, in its most melancholy aspect. World of corpses, decay and collapse. Of feces. All that has died, slipping and disintegrating back down layer by layer. The daemonic world of the immutable; the time-that-was.
And yet, in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It reflected light. Fire, Mr. Tagomi thought. Not dank or dark object at all. Not heavy, weary, but pulsing with life. The high realm, aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. As befits work of art. Yes, that is artist's job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
Has brought the dead to life. Corpse turned to fiery display; the past had yielded to the future.
Which are you? he asked the silver squiggle. Dark dead yin or brilliant living yang? In his palm, the silver squiggle danced and blinded him; he squinted, seeing now only the play of fire.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 242
When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. Now I must seek in other realms.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 241
One final hopeful glance—he again scrutinized with all that he had. Like child, he told himself. Imitate the innocence and faith. On seashore, pressing randomly found shell to head. Hearing in its blabber the wisdom of the sea.
This, with eye replacing ear. Enter me and inform what has been done, what it means, why. Compression of understanding into one finite squiggle.
Asking too much, and so get nothing.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 212
Time would give Mr. Tagomi perspective. Either that, or he would perhaps retreat into the shadows of mental illness, avert his gaze forever, due to a hopeless perplexity.
And we are not really different from him, Mr. Baynes thought. We are faced with the same confusions. Therefore unfortunately we can give Mr. Tagomi no help. We can only wait, hoping that finally he will recover and not succumb.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 212
The crucial point lies not in the present, not in either my death or the death of the two SD men; it lies—hypothetically—in the future. What has happened here is justified, or not justified, by what happens later. Can we perhaps save the lives of millions, all Japan in fact?
But the man manipulating the vegetable stalks could not think of that; the present, the actuality, was too tangible, the dead and dying Germans on the floor of his office.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 194
Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 192
Christ! We're barbarians compared to them, Childan realized. We're no more than boobs against such pitiless reasoning. Paul did not say—did not tell me—that our art was worthless; he got me to say it for him. And, as a final irony, he regretted my utterance. Faint, civilized gesture of sorrow as he heard the truth out of me.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 186
"In other words, an entire new world is pointed to, by this. The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it? I have pondered this pin unceasingly, yet cannot fathom it. We evidently lack the word for an object like this. So you are right, Robert. It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world."
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 185
"The hands of the artificer," Paul said, "had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of some medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I am deeply moved, as you may see."
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 144
Her body and the body of the man in her arms were damp with perspiration. A drop, rolling down Joe's forehead, clung a moment to his cheekbone, then fell to her throat.
"You're still dripping," she murmured.
He said nothing. His breathing, long, slow, regular . . . like the ocean, she thought. We're nothing but water inside.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 134
Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed—all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 131
...black, flaming, the spirit of old seemed for an instant once again to blaze up. The quivering, shambling body jerked taut; the head lifted. Out of the lips that ceaselessly drooled, a croaking half-bark, half-whisper. "Deutsche, hier steh' Ich." Shudders among those who watched and listened, the earphones pressed tightly, strained faces of Russian, American, British and German alike. Yes, Karl thought. Here he stands once more . . . they have beaten us—and more. They have stripped this superman, shown him for what he is.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 130
Below in the rubble another handful of survivors buried, without even the sound of death. Death had spread out everywhere equally, over the living, the hurt, the corpses layer after layer that already had begun to smell. The stinking, quivering corpse of Berlin, the eyeless turrets still upraised, disappearing without protest like this one, this nameless edifice that man had once put up with pride.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 111
What would it be like, he wondered, to really know the Tao? The Tao is that which first lets the light, then the dark. Occasions the interplay of the two primal forces so that there is always renewal. It is that which keeps it all from wearing down. The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths. That is the Way. When the seed falls, it falls into the earth, into the soil. And beneath, out of sight, it comes to life.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 87
Resting her chin on her folded arms on the table surface and gazing at him sideways, she said, "Have you moved in here permanently? And what are you up to?" Brooding over the insult, the slanders. You petrify me.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 72
"We are absurd," Mr. Tagomi said, "because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?"
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 66
"It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here." He tapped his head. "In the mind, not the gun."
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 53
I'm too small, he thought, I can only read what's written, glance up and then lower my head and plod along where I left off as if I hadn't seen; the oracle doesn't expect me to start running up and down the streets, squalling and yammering for public attention.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 53
It's the fault of those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can't fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 42
Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 39
"But that's the task of art," Lotze said. "To advance the spirituality of man, over the sensual. Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy. The Jewish and capitalist millionaires, the international set that supported the decadent art. Those times are over; art has to go on—it can't stay still."
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 37
He was not as young as she had thought. Hard to tell; the intensity all around him disturbed her judgment. Continually he drew his hand through his hair, combing it back with crooked, rigid fingers. There's something special about this man, she thought. He breathes—death. It upset her, and yet attracted her.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 37
The Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester's Antigas Pills—he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease. The entire world knew it, and yet the Leader's gabble was still sacred, still Holy Writ. The views had infected a civilization by now, and, like evil spores, the blind blond Nazi queens were swishing out from Earth to the other planets, spreading the contamination.
What you get for incest: madness, blindness, death.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 22
Nor did he take notice of the enormous neon signs with their permanent ads obliterating the front of virtually every large building. After all, he had his own sign; at night it blazed on and off in company with all the others of the city. What other way did one advertise? One had to be realistic.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 14
She seemed so close right now . . . as if he still had her. That spirit, still busy in his life, padding though his room in search of—whatever it was Juliana sought.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 13
But even then, toward the end, when they had been fighting so much, he still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal invention of God's, dropped into his life for reasons he would never know. And on that account—a sort of religious intuition or faith about her—he could not get over having lost her.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 12
He, Juliana, the factory on Gough Street, the Trade Missions that ruled, the exploration of the planets, the billion chemical heaps in Africa that were now not even corpses, the aspirations of the thousands around him in the shanty warrens of San Francisco, the mad creatures in Berlin with their calm faces and manic plans—all connected in this moment of casting the yarrow stalks to select the exact wisdom appropriate in a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C. A book created by the sages of China over a period of five thousand years, winnowed, perfected, that superb cosmology—and science—codified before Europe had even learned to do long division.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 12
Here came the hexagram, brought forth by the passive chance workings of the vegetable stalks. Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 10
For the ghosts of dead tribes. Wiped out to make a land of—what? Who knew? Maybe even the master architects in Berlin did not know. Bunch of automatons, building and toiling away. Building? Grinding down. Ogres out of a paleontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy's skull.
The Man in the High Castle - Pg 3
How easily, Childan thought, I could fall in love with a girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren't bad enough already.
Monday, March 14, 2016
In Our Time - Pg 213
"I think he did right, though, shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself."
It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.
In Our Time - Pg 180
There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them, faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far off hills of the height of land.
In Our Time - Pg 178
Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.
Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.
In Our Time - Pg 175
Maera wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.
In Our Time - Pg 154
"This course rides itself. It's the pace you're going at, that makes riding the jumps dangerous, Joe. We ain't going any pace here, and they ain't any really bad jumps either. But it's the pace always--not the jumps that makes the trouble."
In Our Time - Pg 130
Part of the time he talked in d'Ampezzo dialect and sometimes in Tyroler German dialect. He could not make out which the young gentleman and his wife understood the best so he was being bilingual. But as the young gentleman said, Ja, Ja, Peduzzi decided to talk altogether in Tyroler. The young gentleman and the wife understood nothing.
In Our Time - Pg 90
Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.
In Our Time - Pg 121
"I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big know at the back that I can feel," she said. "I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her."
"Yeah?" George said from the bed.
"And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes."
"Oh, shut up and get something to read," George said.
In Our Time - Pg 111
At first Hubert had no idea of marrying Cornelia. He had never thought of her that way. She had been suck a good friend of his, and then one day in the little back room of the shop they had been dancing to the gramophone while her girl friend was in the front of the shop and she had looked up into his eyes and he had kissed her. He could never remember just when it was decided that they were to be married. But they were married.
In Our Time - Pg 93
He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it.
In Our Time - Pg 87
While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed, "Oh Jesus Christ get me out of here. Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus." The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
In Our Time - Pg 81
Stretcher beaters would be along any time now. Nick turned his head and looked down at Rinaldi. "Senta Rinaldo; Senta. You and me we've made a separate peace." Rinaldi lay still in the sun, breathing with difficulty. "We're not patriots." Nick turned his head away, smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.
In Our Time - Pg 78
"He likes to think I'm crazy and I don't mind. I like to be with him and I like seeing the country and I don't have to commit no larceny to do it. I like living like a gentleman."
In Our Time - Pg 54
On his way back to the living room he passed a mirror in the dining room and looked in it. His face looked strange. He smiled at the face in the mirror and it grinned back at him. He winked at it and went on. It was not his face but it didn't make any difference.
In Our Time - Pg 52
"Got any more?" Nick asked.
"There's plenty more but dad only likes me to drink what's open."
"Sure," said Nick
"He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards," Bill explained.
In Our Time - Pg 40
"It isn't fun any more."
He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. "It isn't fun any more. Not any of it."
She didn't say anything. He went on. "I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside me. I don't know, Marge. I don't know what to say."
He looked on at her back.
"Isn't love any fun?" Marjorie said.
In Our Time - Pg 21
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
In Our Time - Pg 13
Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, "I'm drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused."
The Wish List - Pg 166
The boys were flaked out on the bank, blowing smoke into the blue night, or firing stones into the middle of the river. I settled in with the bunch raking a handful of pebbles from the riverbank. It seems tame enough these days, with all the entertainment young people have. But to us, sitting on a riverbank, with rock and roll music floating across from the city, and no work to do--it was the height of luxury.
The Wish List - Pg 110
An ethereal ray of white light exploded from the point of lip contact. It bathed the pores of every man, woman, and spirit in the studio. Of course nobody realized that. They just knew that for a single moment everything was better in the world.
The Wish List - Pg 97
TV soundstages look different in real life. Smaller for a start. And on television you don't see the edges. It was as though some giant had taken a bite out of a suburban house, and then, realizing the decor was horrendous, spat it out in Donnybrook.
The Wish List - Pg 70
But Lowrie was far too immersed to be distracted by smart aleckry. His memories floated out of him. Wafting in luscious shades from his face and painting vague shapes in the air.
The Wish List - Pg 12
The tunnel was so huge as to appear boundless. The illusion was shattered by rings of blue light that pulsated along its length like the heartbeat of some fantastic creature. Other dots floated in the slightly liquid air. Meg realized these motes were, in fact, people.
People floating in a tunnel? Hadn't she heard something about that before? Something about a tunnel and a light.
So, Meg Finn told herself: I'm dead.
Friday, March 11, 2016
The Inheritor - Pg 347
The temple seemed to vibrate with soft tension, and it seemed that there was the sound somewhere of a very distant bell, and Leslie knew that somewhere, sometime, in another world or another galaxy or another life, she had stood like this and watched a man she loved damn himself from life to life, and that he had turned away from the offered redemption.
The Inheritor - Pg 297
When the dishes had been returned to the altar, Leslie asked, "What now?"
"Now," said Claire prosaically, "we scramble some eggs or something. We both need food, to close down the psychic centers." And when Leslie would have asked questions, Claire shook her head. "Don't talk about it," she said, "it dissipates the power. Later."
The Inheritor - Pg 292
Claire whispered, "Alison is not happy with what has happened here."
Mediums, Leslie thought in disgust. Why did they never have anything to say except the obvious? Quoting from the world's most famous ghost story, she said aloud, dryly, "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the gravel To tell us this."
The Inheritor - Pg 291
"Your old stereotype devil is no more than horns and hoofs and a goat—the medieval Christian version of the Great God Pan. Pan was harmless—even benevolent. And that's one of the archetypes from the collective unconscious that keeps turning up in the human race's psyche. But the church fathers in the Middle Ages were so inhibited and sexphobic that whenever they got a glimpse of that particular archetype they had to believe it was the devil."
"Why would they mix up Pan with the devil?"
"Because the human is the only animal, except the goat, which has full-time sexuality. Other mammals turn it off unless they're breeding. And the goat has always been the archetypal image of unbridled sexuality. Which scared the hell out of your church fathers, who preferred dividing sheep from goats. Pan would be a devil to people whose prime objective was repressing their own sexuality."
The Inheritor - Pg 252
Was any human problem, in fact, soluble? She felt overwhelmed with the weight of human misery.
The Inheritor - Pg 249
Many things had surprised her lately; the calmness with which she had begun to accept this part of her life was one of them. There was a balance to everything. Simon and Emily had music to give the world. She had only such small skill as she could give to the troubled, and that was too little to justify all she had been given, so she must use this other gift too.
The Inheritor - Pg 246
The garden was so peaceful, green leaves surrounding her with light; the very sky seemed to cast a greenish color over her. There was so much green here for a city built on sand dunes. But every blade of it, she remembered, even the exotics in Golden Gate Park, had been brought here by human agency, and cultivated blade by blade and leaf by leaf. Was there a lesson somewhere in that, that one could not leave everything to nature? Briefly she had a vision of the city stretching bare, waves of sand out to the sea.
The Inheritor - Pg 205
"If thoughts can affect the material universe, and I think the evidence is in that it can, then the work we do on the material plane—purifications, incense, protecting thoughts or prayers, whichever way you wish to define them—then these thoughts can spread out beyond this level where we are sweeping and cleaning and performing our rituals, to create a psychic barrier to unwanted intrusions from other levels of the Universe. I honestly could not say whether it is in fact subjective or objective, but I also believe it does not matter; results are what matter to me, and those I have seen."
The Inheritor - Pg 202
The nearest he ever came to mentioning religion, on one occasion when she said carelessly, "God damn it," upon snagging a run in her pantyhose, he said lightly, "My darling, it seems absurd to condemn something to eternal theological punishment when what you mean is How very tiresome."
The Inheritor - Pg 201
"Satanists create their own devils, as pious religious people summon up their own God, and I want nothing whatever to do with either of them. Most organized churches call up thoughtforms of a God just as bigoted as anyone else's devil."
The Inheritor - Pg 201
"I have no graven images or idols, no hint of Satan or demons; I think all that is disgustingly vulgar; Satanists and such idiots are usually ineffective rebels who had a painful overdose of Catholic bigotry in childhood and want to kick over the sacred traces."
The Inheritor - Pg 200
"We do not have a radio and probably would not turn it on if we did—we have better things to do with ourselves." He touched her intimately, and she snuggled close to him. "But even without the radio, all those things, the Latin Mass, the rock music blasting, the babbling crazies, they are all around us somewhere in the air waves. Do you think we are unaffected by them, even though we have not tuned them in?"
The Inheritor - Pg 197
Why at that moment did she remember Colin saying, If it would do any good, you could have my hands. She knew it was true of her. She would give her hand for his, and do it without flinching, and knew this was what was meant by love.
The Inheritor - Pg 196
"I hope you welcomed me," he said soberly, caressing her breasts with his scarred hand. He had removed the splinted glove that kept the fourth and fifth fingers extended, and they were curled motionless against his palm. "The doctors say I must use these fingers constantly if I wish to regain their perfect use." He moved them on her in a way she had not known how to desire before this.
Monday, March 7, 2016
The Inheritor - Pg 195
She had never believed in love, certainly not in romantic love, and her training as a psychologist had made her very skeptical; either it was a fantasy of silly women, sentimental nonsense by which they strove to justify actions based on sexual passion, or else it was a myth invented to exploit those same silly women and sell them trashy novels, makeup and perfume.
She had never felt remotely like this.
The Inheritor - Pg 195
"We are applause junkies, all of us who want to perform. That is what colorless people like Colin will never understand; when you have known that particular high, everything else becomes bland, ordinary, dead; you live only when you are before an audience, and everything and everyone becomes only part of an audience."
The Inheritor - Pg 193
"The career of a concert performer dies with him, but the teacher lives as long as his pupils, and the legacy of the great conductors transforms music for a whole generation."
The Inheritor - Pg 189
"I am not really a religious person," Claire said, then amended it. "No, that's not true. I am a religious person. I just hate the enormous lot of rubbish people talk when they start talking religion, so I try to avoid that kind of jargon."
The Inheritor - Pg 189
"People who have a religious approach, those who are into Wicca or involved with the Mystery religions, sometimes speak of being 'in the Craft' instead of being on the Path, but it's the same thing: being aware of the road we all travel from life to life toward—whatever it is that you think we are sent here to accomplish."
The Inheritor - Pg 185
"A man came to one of the great Incarnations of Buddha, and said, 'I have spent ten years in fasting and prayer, and lo, I have learned to levitate myself over the river.' And the Buddha said, 'Foolish man, you have spent ten years in learning to do what the ferryman would have done for a penny, which you could earn by an hour of honest labor; and behold in those ten years you could have done much in this world to relieve the suffering of mankind.'"
The Inheritor - Pg 183
Leslie took out money to pay for the books. Colin said, as she opened her wallet, "If the cost is a hardship to you, Dr. Barnes, you can take them home and read them and return them at your leisure. We do sell books, but we also have a very firm policy that no one should go without their help if they need it and can't afford it, so we often lend books to people who can't buy them. Those books outside," he added with a friendly chuckle, "we put outside in the hopes that people will steal them; we are pleasantly surprised when anyone comes in and actually gives us a quarter for them."
The Inheritor - Pg 172
She found curious thoughts floating through her mind as she stood under the pounding water, as if she was washing off Joel's touch on her body and memory, observing some kind of ritual preparation for him.
The Inheritor - Pg 145
Although for all the good she was doing her patients, she might as well be an astrologer or a psychic. At least the psychic or the astrologer could give them the illusion of hope, instead of giving them mental health to go out and live in an insane society which would probably bomb itself to shreds before the century ended.
The Inheritor - Pg 139
"I'm going to try and find another school for Christina," Susan said slowly. "I am beginning to realize that someday I may have to institutionalize her. Until then I'll do my best, I'll give her what I can, all the love I can. And when I can't maybe I'll just have to go on to the next thing. If she has my—my support and love while I can give it, then maybe—" She stopped again, and said at last, "If she was born the way she was for a reason, then maybe her destiny isn't entirely up to me. I can only do so much for her before I have to let her—" She was searching for words now, slowly, thinking it over, "find out what her destiny is, even if it isn't to stay home and be my poor helpless baby."
The Inheritor - Pg 139
"I don't know," Leslie said again, while with one detached part of her mind she wondered why she was saying this; but she had never been so sure of anything in her life. "How do we know how things would look from the perspective of more lives than one? It's possible that for some reason you felt you needed to learn compassion for the handicapped; perhaps you felt you had been insensitive to the needs of someone. Or perhaps Chrissy, for some reason, felt that she needed to learn the lesson of being something other than perfect—a lesson of humility, perhaps, or of helplessness—and she came to you because you were the right parent."
The Inheritor - Pg 136
They were deep in conversation about the operas of Gluck and Handel.
If there was a ghost, could it survive layers of fresh paint, and the attentions of young cheerful people?
The Inheritor - Pg 128
As she finished the Bach, she heard a tiny spray of notes, like an echo from a harpsichord, and thought of Miss Margrave. Was she really pleased to have two women who shared her interests in the house she had loved? She told herself that she did not for one moment believe Rainbow's story, but it was pleasant to imagine the soft echo of Alison Margrave's harpsichord in the room she had loved.
The Inheritor - Pg 107
Looking at him kneeling by the carton, his hair windblown, Leslie thought again that she really enjoyed him; she bent and kissed him quickly on the forehead.
The Inheritor - Pg 105
Last night I met upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
Gee, how I wish he'd go away.
The Inheritor - Pg 79
All Leslie could do for her now was to listen to them—and it was a crime to live in a society where people had to pay somebody to listen to their troubles—but at least she listened conscientiously.
The Inheritor - Pg 77
She knew it was the unstated message between all parents and all counselors: "Here is this son or daughter of mine who is not behaving the way I want her to. Take her and make her over into the kind of son or daughter I want her to be!"
The Inheritor - Pg 70
Frodo. She wondered what his parents had christened him. Probably Melvin, or something worse. Then, for an unexpected instant, it was as if a film dropped from Leslie's eyes and she saw him as the girl had seen him, an elvish creature incongruously indoors, a wild thing; she could almost see the shadow of antlers over his brow. Then the flash was gone, and he was only an outlandishly costumed youngster again. He waved to the girl.
The Inheritor - Pg 68
"That's why I'm so crazy about the Conservatory. Even old Whittington. He's nuts but he cares about things, even if what he cares about is a little crazy."
The Inheritor - Pg 46
She had had to come to terms with the knowledge that she was psychic; but this was not the terrifying thing it had been when she saw Juanita García, bloody and violated, under a drainage ditch. It was the faintest whisper of sound, almost music. A benevolent presence; an old woman ready to die, struck down quickly by a stroke or heart attack at her beloved instrument. The very way a musician would wish to go, surely.
The Inheritor - Pg 31
"I hoped you would want to be part of that whole structure. To be—" he hesitated, searching for words, "to be half of a marriage; not a loose partnership of two independent people jogging along side by side until they find somebody they like better."
The Inheritor - Pg 31
He didn't laugh. He pushed the wineglass away, staring at his plate. His hands were long and handsome, the fingers muscular and efficient. Sensuous, too, she thought, then hardened herself against the memory which could weaken her to the very core of her being.
The Inheritor - Pg 29
Our bodies fit too perfectly. That's why we never get to talk about serious things.
The Inheritor - Pg 8
A crackle of the dried juniper branches she had gathered in the Berkeley hills, which slowly took flame and shot up with a cheery roar, driving back the dank mist. She stood with her hands stretched to the kindly warmth; but outside, the windows were so white she could not see the garden. She felt the chill from the open window and went to close it. Fog was beautiful.
When it stayed outside where it belonged.
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