The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.

The idea that people feel just one basic emotion at a time is a further contrivance of memoirs.

His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways.

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at lea

The girl in cotton bodice and her jeans gone fugitive at the knees.

The one who’d asked had a sideburn and the invulnerable smile of someone who’s had two airport cocktails and nothing but nuts.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

There was the yeasty smell of wet men.