"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" [.]

<On going home:>

• Marriage is the classic betrayal.
• Some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from.
• I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmothers's teacups.
• California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.
• (On U.S. 99): All day long, all that moves is the sun, and the big Rainbird sprinklers.
• It makes one wonder.. that Sacramento is not the city. In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.

<Other places:>

• Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter...
• (Hawaii) nor to the frenetic paean to middle-income leisure
• (Newport mansions) are products of the metastasis of capital.
• "Happiness" is, after all, a consumption ethic, {??} and Newport is the monument of a society in which production was seen as the moral point。
• a sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made
• It has the stridency usually credited to the frontier.
• A place that seems to illustrate.. that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.
• As far as the town goes, Graham Greene might have written it: a shadowy square with a filigree pergola for the Sunday band, a racket of birds, a cathedral in bad repair with a robin's-egg-blue tile dome, a turkey buzzard on the cross.
• I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I know that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.
• New York.. was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane;

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