Highlights

“Ah, only squares? Listen to you. Despite the beatnik talk I don’t miss your implication for the rest of us. What licenses you to judge so severely?” “You’re telling me you don’t sort the world into those with and without a clue, Rose? Would you prefer if I use your word - sheep?”

. . .

A man, everything that happened to you was done by a man. For a revolutionary your heartbreak is awfully pedestrian.

. . .

Nine months later, out pops a proletariat!

. . .

Utopia was better when equipped with a subway stop so you could go screaming back to reality for five cents.

. . .

“Loose lips sink ships” was the phrase. Well, they could also get you sunk in American Communism.

. . .

Rose’s Communism in the war years was like the book of ration stamps she’d been issued, with another like it for the infant Miriam, each of which Rose preserved in its own wallet of the softest calfskin, an irony when you couldn’t get beef. Like the ration stamps, so with your political self: You tore off a square of your essence and laid it down only when necessary, hoarding the remainder in hopes the supply would extend until the siege was over.

. . .

The difficulty in beholding another person was how you stood in your own way. To be struck open, as Tommy had just now been struck, was to wade into a mire of self-beholding.

. . .

Days spent as a lonely walker in the great mad city, he understood its genius to be that of indifference, the conferral of the sweet gift of anonymity on hordes tormented by a surplus of identity, by a surplus of wounds and legacies, and he felt himself to be one upon whom this gift was quite utterly wasted. No use to confer anonymity on a man who’d already achieved anonymity, a man for whom that was his only achievement. No use to offer absolution to the unguilty or disguise to the invisible.

. . .

Listen, boys and girls, young adults, what I’m talking about is the project we’re always already engaged in and will never conclude, that of unsuffocating our minds with the basic falsehoods known as everyday life. Put aside your pens, quit writing down what I’m saying. Let’s talk about your mothers, fuckers.

. . .

In her exhaustion, Rose no longer buttonholed, no longer demanded introduction to each new face that appeared — a momentary lapse that became a landslide into anonymity. As she awarded her customary silent treatment to those she’d known for decades, and was unable to forge a connection to these young couples who’d likely respond with uncomprehending politeness, a gulf yawned on the sidewalk between Rose and any other human. The radical basis that had made Rose’s indignation an idealist’s warrant had become difficult to recall, even for her. Lacking warrant, she took on disconcerting resemblance to a bitter old lady. Silence once loaded with admonitory implication was now mere silence

. . .

You think a quarter century of infiltrated cells didn’t make me a sorcerer at keeping my yap shut? You think I won’t go to my grave with secrets of global import? Sure, I’ve been an enemy of bourgeois propriety my whole life, it doesn’t mean I care wreck your home. Be orderly in your married life so that you may be violent and original in your adulterous affairs, that’s Flaubert who said that. I’ll tutor you in doublethink, Archie, just for God’s sake and I don’t even believe in God take me in your arms.

. . .

"Capitalism wouldn’t get out of the way. We couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t begin to exist. It filled all the available space."

"The God That Refused to Fail?"

"Yes!

. . .

“You did okay, though, Rose. You existed for a while. It’s in the record books.”

. . .

Critical thinking might merely be another name for triage, the salvaging of what could be salvaged from the continuous ruin of human occasions.

. . .

He was reeling, he felt, but it was a kind of happiness, though it discovered no happy conclusion. Maybe it was enough to reel.