Another day and another passed of rough seas and low­er­ing skies; of rolling and pitch­ing, cold winds, and cold damp eat­ing into bones soft­ened by tropic warmth; of a tread­mill of watches in a wheel­house dank and gloomy by day and danker and gloomier by night; of sullen silent sailors and pale dog-tired offi­cers, of meals in the ward­room eaten in silence, with the cap­tain at the head of the table cease­lessly rolling the balls in his fin­gers and say­ing noth­ing except an infre­quent grumpy sen­tence about the progress of the work requests. Willie lost track of time. He stum­bled from the bridge to his cod­ing, from cod­ing to cor­rect­ing pub­li­ca­tions, from cor­rec­tions back up to the bridge, from the bridge to the table for an unap­pe­tiz­ing bolted meal, from the table to the clip­ping shack for sleep which never went unin­ter­rupted for more than a cou­ple of hours. The world became nar­rowed to a wob­bling iron shell on a waste of foamy gray, and the busi­ness of the world was star­ing out at empty water or mak­ing red-ink inser­tions in the devil’s own end­less library of mildewed unin­tel­li­gi­ble volume.

p. 233

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The two com­mand­ing offi­cers sat in De Vriess’s cabin, drink­ing cof­fee. Queeg leaned back com­fort­ably in the low black leather arm­chair. De Vriess was in the swivel chair at his desk.

“Kind of sud­den, this whole deal,” said De Vriess.

“Well, I didn’t much like being yanked out of anti-submarine school,” said Queeg. “I’d moved my wife and fam­ily down to San Diego and we were all set for six good weeks, any­way. First shore bil­let I’d had in four years.”

“I’m sorry for your wife.”

“Well, she’s a pretty good sport.”

“They have to be.” After a moment of silent sip­ping De Vriess said, “You’re class of ’34?”

“Thirty-six,” said Queeg.

De Vriess knew this. He also knew Queeg’s prece­dence num­ber, his class stand­ing, and sev­eral other facts about him. But it was a nice point of eti­quette to sim­u­late igno­rance. It was a cour­tesy, too, to place Queeg by mis­take in an ear­lier class; it implied that Queeg was obtain­ing a com­mand for which he was rather young. “They’re mov­ing you fel­lows up now pretty fast.”

p. 151

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The dread­ful thing, which the girl had antic­i­pated no more than a col­li­sion of the earth with a comet, and which her faith­less lover had been half-consciously plan­ning for weeks, had just hap­pened. The taxi­cab was speed­ing through the deserted Sixty-sixth Street under­pass from the east to the west side of the park. Honey Beaton cringed in a cor­ner of the back seat as though she had been struck, her face tear-stained and bowed, her left hand tightly grip­ping a metal bracket, her whole body shrink­ing against the side of the car as though she feared noth­ing so much as that Andrew Reale might touch her. Indeed, this gal­lant had endeav­ored to quiet her grief with a caress, only to be repulsed with a vehe­mence that star­tled his very soul. Now he sat in con­fu­sion, gaz­ing at the appalling havoc he had wrought. There was lit­tle in the girl’s appear­ance to rec­om­mend her to the buy­ers of beauty now, as she wailed, clutched her tum­bled yel­low hair, gnashed her teeth and con­torted her face in the fury of a death-wounded heart. In vain did Andrew attempt to inter­ject words of com­fort or apol­ogy; she seized on every phrase as it came from his mouth, twisted it into a bit­ter denun­ci­a­tion and made it an occa­sion for a fresh parox­ysm of mis­ery. The taxi swung around cor­ners, stopped like a trained metal beast at the flash of red lights, and moved again with a grind­ing whine of old gears as the lights snapped green. The broad back, round head, and wide ears of the dri­ver might have been made of the dead sub­stance of the auto­mo­bile, for all the acknowl­edg­ment he made of the hor­rid scene behind him, and for all the atten­tion that the ago­nized lovers paid him.

The girl’s pas­sion, after rag­ing for twenty min­utes in mount­ing crescen­dos, began to spend itself her sobs sub­sided, her wild and inco­her­ent utter­ances ceased and she fell to quiet weep­ing, her face averted from Andrew. He, still stunned by the force and sur­prise of her out­burst, dared not speak. The sight of the bal­anced, placid Laura as a mad­dened female had been a dis­turb­ing one, and (as he thought), he felt immense ten­der­ness, sym­pa­thy, and regret for her, but he had no doubt of the wis­dom of his course, and no inten­tion of being diverted from it by the over­praised power of a woman’s tears. Not only had Honey Beaton’s lust been dimmed by her lapse into hys­ter­ics, but he even felt a strange, obscure glow of sat­is­fac­tion, of which the storm he had raised in this desir­able breast was some­how the cause. When the taxi­cab drew up before the girl’s apart­ment build­ing and she auto­mat­i­cally moved to get out, Andrew sud­denly felt that he did not want the exchange to end. He had to per­suade Honey that he had done well, for her as well as for him­self, and sensed a con­fi­dence in the rea­son­ings that quickly gath­ered to the por­tals of his tongue. Gen­tly he detained her in her seat, and began to talk. Dry­ing her eyes, Laura lis­tened with wan atten­tive­ness in an oth­er­wise immo­bile face.

The meter clicked on and the dri­ver sat with the patience of an old priest, his eyes look­ing straight ahead at the dark, lonely avenue splashed here and there with the elec­tric sign of a tav­ern or del­i­catessen, as the ambi­tious young man poured forth his apol­ogy. After all the dec­la­ra­tions, pro­pos­als, jilt­ings, seduc­tions, rup­ture, rec­on­cil­i­a­tions, and denoue­ments which the dri­ver had heard in the rude con­fes­sional of the front seat, screened by the per­fect anonymity of the back of his head, he was as wearily wise as Eccle­si­astes, and he scarcely had an ironic sigh left for the pat­tern of words which Andrew Reale was earnestly impro­vis­ing under the impres­sion that it was the first time in his­tory that a decamp­ing lover had ever been so con­sid­er­ate and lucid.

pg 161 — 163

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“You don’t think I should encour­age her in her art courses, Mr. Wilde?” said Marquis.

“Don’t be an ass, Mar­quis,” said the painter. “Keep her at it until the day she mar­ries. The Vic­to­ri­ans, at whom we sneer, knew the value of wrap­ping a girl in the cot­ton wadding of aes­thetic stud­ies. It’s the only way to keep fresh the sparkle of her igno­rance, virginity’s chief charm. A girls’ school today sul­lies and dulls young females to a middle-aged famil­iar­ity with sex machin­ery and domes­tic man­age­ment before they have been authen­ti­cally kissed. Let her paint or sing or write until she charms and weds a young man as rich and untal­ented as her­self. Only, in all char­ity, never expose her prod­ucts again to a man of taste. They are puppy yappings.”

p. 178

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Inex­orably as a cold satel­lite, the event moves nearer and nearer to Now. What strain­ing philoso­pher ever got as good an intu­ition of the onward flow of time as does a hes­i­tant bride while her sands of maid­en­hood run swiftly out?

p. 173

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The true satirist of our time, who played such a hugely suc­cess­ful joke on us that his works are still taught in our schools as eco­nomic treatises–a pro­ce­dure as sen­si­ble as using Gul­liver for a text­book in geography–said with his usual pen­e­tra­tion that inven­tions like the air­plane, far from eas­ing the bur­den of liv­ing, work to increase it because, while such devices do greatly help the process of con­clud­ing busi­ness, they also mul­ti­ply the occa­sions for start­ing it, and since man’s ten­dency to cre­ate con­fu­sion has, since the begin­ning of time, slightly out­run his capac­ity to cope with it, these toys of a new age sim­ply project the old los­ing race on a gigan­tic scale, with man yield­ing ground by the increased drain on his ner­vous system.

p 195

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In the mid­dle of Chap­ter 9, in the mid­dle of Stephen English’s sketch of the noto­ri­ous and revered artist, Michael Wilde:

He does have a bent for per­verse flam­boy­ance, but instead of check­ing it, he exploits it. He takes hor­rid themes because they cause talk; he uses long, point­less titles for the same rea­son. He blath­ers about good­ness and beauty and his own genius for the same rea­son. To bring the thing off as well as Mike has done requires address, I grant you, and a gift for moun­te­bank­ing; but it must be great fun, once he over­comes the loss of face involved in mak­ing an ass of him­self in pub­lic. Nobody can com­mit the impro­pri­ety of pub­lic self-praise with­out los­ing per­sonal dig­nity and integrity, but, in the field of the arts, it’s a com­mon sac­ri­fice. You see the pat­tern repeat itself two or three times in each gen­er­a­tion. A man of mod­er­ate tal­ent pro­claims, “I am a genius,” and backs his asser­tion with col­or­ful social and artis­tic eccen­tric­i­ties. These have noth­ing to do with genius, but the crowd thinks they do, and so his claim is improved. Shake­speare, Bach, and Blake didn’t find it nec­es­sary to use the tech­nique. Mike’s an excel­lent painter, and his work will last his time and keep him well-to-do, but his mouth long ago out­sped his brush. I’ve said these things to him, so I’m not vio­lat­ing our friend­ship in telling you the truth about him.

pg 105–106

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From near the end of Chap­ter 9:

It will be very hard, surely, to jus­tify to the gen­tle reader what must seem a loose­ness in our heroine’s behav­ior. Remem­ber, then, that even Noah, the only man deemed wor­thy of being saved from a world’s destruc­tion, was described as being merely “right­eous in his gen­er­a­tion.” The man­ners of the time and place in which Laura lived took an exceed­ingly friv­o­lous view of the impor­tance of hold­ing hands, and indeed of other, some­what more search­ing lib­er­ties. Moral­ity is eter­nal, but its modes fluc­tu­ate. A Japan­ese, they say, thinks noth­ing of bathing naked in the same tub with a stranger of the oppo­site sex, but a clasp of hands between the two would be a turn­ing point. We our­selves observe with great calm our young ladies walk­ing on beaches with all but a half-dozen cru­cial square inches of their skins exposed; an hour later, we are shocked to see one of them come in to din­ner wear­ing a skirt which ends an inch above the knee. Laura was, beyond doubt, right­eous in her gen­er­a­tion; yet, betrothed though she was, she per­mit­ted Stephen Eng­lish to hold her hand. That this was an inad­vis­able kind­ness will per­haps be seen in the sequel.

p. 107

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Near the start of Chap­ter 9:

Mike [a noto­ri­ous and revered painter] was born in the Irish slums that used to exist around Ninety-sixth Street and Colum­bus Avenue in New York. He has, there­fore, the poignant love of money that’s reserved only for peo­ple who’ve known poverty. Rich peo­ple respect money because it’s their safety, but to poor peo­ple money is free­dom. Never for­get that when you ana­lyze the behav­ior of some­one who used to be poor; there’s a frisk­i­ness about such per­sons which is only the light­ness of limb that comes from tak­ing off chains.

p. 103

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From the mid­dle of Chap­ter 9:

Well, at the time, he was in the thick of the impe­cu­nious artis­tic set that you used to find sit­ting around in front of the Dome in the evenings, drink­ing fines and argu­ing about every­thing. He fell into the hands of a cel­e­brated pre­miere danseuse, who was well on the nos­tal­gic side of thirty [!], and he became a pet of the bal­let people.

p 104

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