So a wholly cynical strategy, if there’s a financial risk attached, becomes an act of artistic bravery?
. . .
On the high prairie where he’d grown up, a person who took it easy wasn’t much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom “easygoing” was a compliment.
. . .
She was always wrong, and it was demoralizing to dwell perpetually in the cellar of your wrongness, to wait perpetually for someone to take pity on you in your wrongness.
. . .
To the face of clocks the relief of order - two hands pointing squarely at whole numbers - came only once an hour. As every other moment failed to square, so every moment held the potential for fluish misery. And to suffer like this for no reason. To know there was no moral order in the flu, no justice in the juices of pain his brain produced. The world nothing but a materialization of blind, eternal Will.
. . .
Even at the age of seven Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture of his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.
. . .
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally strong as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.
. . .
There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only possible portal to the infinite.
