51 quotes
From the day of his talkative, overconfident arrival at Irving he had failed and failed at learning how not to behave like a jerk; and everybody knew what kind of life a jerk could expect at prep school.
Cold Spring Harbor (1986)
There would probably always be kids like Grove in prep schools: you would find only irritation in trying to help them, or to like them, and you could probably never bring yourself to call them by their first names until ten years later, when they came back to visit the school with their wives.
A Good School (1978)
To find order in chaos - why, of course; that was what he'd wanted all his life.
He had been born for this, for finding order in chaos, and all the wasted years has been a mistake.
To find order in chaos; to find order in chaos.
Disturbing the Peace (1975)
"You make it sound so easy." But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the only other man she had ever known who could do that was Willard Slade. All the others, George, for example, had made easy things sound difficult.
A Special Providence (1969)
The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl's nose to do.
Disturbing the Peace (1975)
"Yeah, well, sure, 'remarkably intelligent'. Look, baby, the world is crawling with these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they're all remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence."
Young Hearts Crying (1984)
she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence
Disturbing the Peace (1975)
"Where are the windows?" he demanded, spreading his hands. "That's the question. Where does the light come in?"
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)
"I mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world."
Revolutionary Road (1961)
And he didn't mind at all. Downstairs and outdoors and alone again, back in the trampled dust in front of the place, he pitied the drab supervisor and all her quick, harried, frowning children because none of them looked as though they had anything worth waiting for, tonight or ever.
Cold Spring Harbor (1986)
Or was it possible that nobody's reasons could be all that clearly defined? Maybe men and women came together in ways as random and mindless as the mating of birds or pigs or insects, so that any talk of "reasons" would always be vain, always be self-deceiving and beside the point. Well, that would be one way of looking at it.
Cold Spring Harbor (1986)