You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity,

While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.…”

Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.

pylorus

Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.

But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is? What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?

the overpowering sloth of sadness

Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

(He is continually starting these self-improvement projects: sometimes it’s memory training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.)