Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.

Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.