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Like many who have no reason for pride, that very lack of reason for it made me the prouder. But certain realities have a way of making themselves felt, and debt is one of them.

It wouldn’t be the first time his sharp tongue had cut his own throat.

A solicitor is a man who does worse things within the law than most crooks do outside it.

See, you get caught up in the past and you become useless to the present.

They’re schemers, so they see schemes.

Hope is the lies we tell ourselves about the future.

Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

When literacy died, so had history.

I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.

This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”

It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.