The Broom Of The System Quotes
"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet."
"I know, but it’s track season at school and I’m on the team and I don’t smoke during the season, I can‘t, it kills me," Lenore says.
"Girls who think they’re pretty don’t care much about their bathrobes being undone."
"That’s offensive and completely blaphemous," says Sue Shaw.
"Well it’s just part of life and everything, what people want to do is more or less their own."
"Lenore, I don’t know," Clarice says. "It’s just not ... it’s just common sense."
"You never told me about any of this stuff at Christmas, Clarice. Armed guards and stuff. Doesn’t it bother you?"
"I’m afraid I’m in no position to say anything about ... ," looking down, "... Lenore Beadsman, area F."
"This one’s not married either, right?" Peter Abbott asked Candy, nodding over at Lenore.
"There are very few visitors here as a rule, you would be surprised."
"A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept."
"We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state."
"Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything. It’s what this state needs. I can feel it."
"Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold."
"A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness."
"I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family."
"A universe-view is one thing. No one can grow to infinite size."
"A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe."
"Lenore, it’s simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being."
"As I sit here, the block of the Erieview shadow slowly dips my office in liquid darkness."
"People should have wedding nights like your breakups."
"Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided."
"The light green mints are particularly good here, I think. You may if you wish each have one."
"The average age of the residents at the facility is eighty-seven. Eighty-seven years of age. How old are you, Ms. Beadsman?"
"The aimlessness after a self-consciously dazzling college career."
"The technological changes alone that they have stood witness to are staggering."
"The Midwest: a place that both is and isn’t."
"The women who reside in facilities now were the first American women to cut their hair short."
"The old are not like you and I, Ms. Beadsman."
"Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use."
"To try to be that relative is unnatural. Thus bad."
"Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented."
"The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child."
"Certain rolls of the dice entitled you to certain movements on the board."
"The chances of falling into chutes increased as you climbed more ladders and got higher."
"The children found this sudden dashing of hopes and return to the recreational drawing board unbelievably fun."
"The game made Lenore feel like throwing its board at the wall."
"I think it’s turning out there’s problems with that analysis."
"The prize impossible to conceive of a more desirable prize."
"The audience had to be restrained with electrified wire mesh."
"The audience completely howled, threw water from behind the wire mesh."
"It was as if the takeoff merely softened my ears up for the landing."
"I can think of no more convincing demonstration of my devotion to you than my coming on this trip."
"The plane isn’t simply going to idle and wait for us at Bradley Field, is it?"
"I think it took off again almost right away."
"The plane’s supposed to be back for us by lunchtime tomorrow."
"I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory."
"Ability To Handle Oneself, elaborate defense structures, exit their eyes and begin to assemble on the ground before them."
"The belonging faces appear in rows, like belts of coins."
"The faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best."
"The faces that know that, but for the grace of a God distinguished for the arbitrariness of his grace."
"The ellipse of my quad-orbit absorbs the indentation of North Dormitory."
"There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic."
"We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve."
"And but if Bill Dailey says, ‘Hi Bob,’ it’s death, you have to chug the whole bottle."
"You can’t just have somebody trying to climb up the side of your house all the time."
"I miss a mom. Mom’s been in that place practically my whole life."
"It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets."
"I have an idea," the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. "Let’s play a game."
"The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks' to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May."
"The pool gives birth to clean new red-eyed children, trembling in cotton capes, and then the slightest wetting of any part of the renewed white skin sends up into space a rebirth of the fragrance of rebirth, a clean that survives until the next bath."
"Is there any skin, any substance at all, softer than the cheek of a young child as it yields under a late-afternoon caress at the swimming pool?"
"The melody of the Slotniks' doorbell took time. It was still playing when Evelyn Slotnik opened the front door."
"What shall we say? Shall we say that reserved parking respects no man?"
"It's when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are."
"There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard."
"The world is turning out to be full of real, real men."
"My God, it's boiling in here. How do you people live? And how am I to walk?"
"The word chosen to designate the act—the supreme act of a distinctively human life, the act in reference to the pleasure and meaning of which I naturally understand myself, being as you once remarked an almost exclusively sexual entity—the word chosen to designate the act must also be extremely important, no?"
"Attachment to things, to places, to other living beings requires in my view expenditures of energy and attention far in excess of the value of the things thus brought into the relation of attachment."
"The attempt to have the order of one's life depend on things and persons outside that life is a silly thing, a thing perhaps appropriate only for those weaker, less successful, less fortunate, less advanced than I."
"The line that seeks purchase in and attachment to an exterior Other is necessarily buttressed, supported, held; it thus becomes small, weak, flabby, reliant on Other."
"Better to have the lines of the fan stand on their own: self-sufficient, rigid, hard, jutting out into space."
"She may be consumed in the line's light, but still the line stands, juts out, rigidly, far into the space exterior to the Self."
"And why doesn't the coyote simply go eat Chinese food? The thing pursued—a skinny meatless bird—is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit."
"For your information, I have been led to understand that the relevant unavailable facility-connected individuals will apparently be back with us very soon."
"Has it not occurred to you that a sense of shall we say social history is strongest among the young, not the old?"
"Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored. Does this account seem reasonable?"
"Perhaps we’ll just step outside and let you finish reading to Concamadine," Mr. Bloemker said, his finger tracing the outline of his beard.
"And this is how it happened that Billy Mink went dinnerless to bed. But he had learned three things, had Billy, and he never forgot them—that wit is often better than skill; that it is not only mean but is very foolish to sneer at another; and that to lose one’s temper is the most foolish thing in the world."
"Then are we invited to extend the same reasoning to your relationship with Dad?" John had said with a laugh.
"Calves, light, legs, light, everything will be all right."
"A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties."
"Lenore what does it mean to feel that you must either kill or die. Does that make us an insect, in a field of light that can be only desired, or else extinguished?"
"But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved."
"Money isn’t even an issue. I’m on vacation. I have unlimited vacation time, nearly, in my career. Retail food prices aren’t expected to change in the next few weeks."
"They'll start sayin' important shit any minute now," Lang said.
"I absolutely insist that you invite me to relate a story."
"Forget smells. You're here to concentrate on potential grandmother-signs."
"This story concerns a man who is presented as the most phenomenally successful theoretical dentist of the twentieth century."
"People aren’t smelling too terrific in this sun, either, I notice."
"I’m afraid he means it, Monroe," said Evelyn into the window.