“Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.”

“Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste.”

“But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.”

“Mothers got a hard road to travel, believe me.”

“Mother doesn't cook, Ignatius said dogmatically, She burns.”

“She ran into the bathroom and powdered her face and the front of her dress, drew a surrealistic version of a mouth beneath her nose, and dashed into her bedroom to find a coat.”

“To you character is a psychosis. Integrity is a complex.”

“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

“Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.”

“The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.”