"Old School"

My favorite part of the book is the protagonist's meeting with the real author of "Summer Dance". The author must have had fun writing (as the part of an earnest vegetarian) an unintentional parody of Ayn Rand too.

• I took long walks through the snowy woods and fields, watching myself do it, admiring my solitude as if from a great height.
• For once I had a complete picture of the world: over here a few disdainful Roarks and a few icy Dominiques.. It was the personal meaning that had me in thrall - the promise of mastery achieved by doing exactly as I pleased.
• This is no ordinary bull, but a horned argonaut of imperial carriage.. who otherwise bears the same resemblance to earthly bovines that the untrammeled wolf, bold ruler of his arctic realm, bears to the permed and coiffured poodle in his rhinestone sweater.
• this whey-faced, homesick boy with his chewed-up fingernails and puppyish need to be in on everything, who in his need had asked Ayn Rand the very question I had been itching to ask... Who is John Galt?
• the old serene trust that the world was kindly and mine for good.. mine was already gone, and with it the trick of not seeing my own fate in that of others.
• You can't read "Indian Camp" and then go back to The Fountainhead.
• The truth of these stories didn't come as a set of theories. You felt it on the back of your neck.
• You felt the hush (in the chapel) as a profound agreement, an act of three hundred wills, and that made it even deeper and more calming.
• To doctor his punch from a friend's flask, but only once, not wanting to dull himself to the unexpected full-heartedness he feels.
• His question was serious, the interest behind it wearily intimate, undefended, as if he had lost whatever push it took to support his urbanity. I was so wrung out myself, so tired of all this beggarly waiting for words...
• Without stories one would hardly know what world one was in... We speak of self-consciousness as a burden or a problem, and so it is - the problem being how to use it to bring ourselves out of exile.
• Alchemy. The dross of self-consciousness transformed into the gold of self-knowledge.
• From this height it was possible to see into the dream that produced the school, not mere English-envy but the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself.
• Make good rules and hold the boys to them. No need to be pawing at their souls. Honor Code? Pretentious nonsense.
• the improvising became an end in itself and left scant room for disciplined invention.
• (How one comes a writer:) after the stories have been (cobbled together and) repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration.
• all the confusion since ("Summer Dance") would be revealed as cunning arabesques in a most intricate, beautifully formed story.
• Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts... It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly.
• Maybe a man of lordly self-conviction and detachment could forsake the place that knew him and not become a ghost. Arch could say only that he was not that man.
• He had given up the good in his life because a fault ran through it.