Julia Higgins’s Reviews > The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 > Status Update

people who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

...for now what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism.

it is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be

the person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes.

"...if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort."

...but the roles that we contract are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it.

...Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is. Richard paid the price such an illusion of safety demands. The price is a turning away from, an ignorance of, all of the powers of darkness.