Tom Quinn

"He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it--if they're really set on getting him ('They' embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany) that's the surest way, doesn't cost them a thing to paint his name on every one, right?" (25)

". . . don't you know there's a war on, moron? yes but--here's Jessica in her sister's hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep in nothing at all, but where is the war?
"Until it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to get to safety, a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical, maybe, spooky as an old northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the great struggle of good and evil the wireless reports everyday. And no reason not just to, well, to keep on. . . ." (54)

"I should . . . should have. . . . There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many 'should haves'--should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers..." (141)

"Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Burgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river--dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you." (162)

"The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel--where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit. . . ." (209)

"This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted . . . of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?" (214)