"East of Eden" II

[fiefoe]

Too bad that there are not too many comedic set-pieces in this novel, but when they come, they are irresistible.
-------------- part 3

• And now his tissue, which had fought joyously against time, gave up a little. His young skin turned old, his clear eyes dulled, and a little stoop came to his great shoulders. Liza with her acceptance could take care of tragedy; she had no real hope this side of Heaven. But Samuel had put up a laughing wall against natural laws, and Una’s death breached his battlements. He became an old man.
• Joe had gone east and was helping to invent a new profession called advertising. Joe’s very faults were virtues in this field. He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming—and, properly applied, that is all advertising is.
• But you could feel Tom when you came near to him—you could feel strength and warmth and an iron integrity. And under all of this was a shrinking—a shy shrinking. He could be as gay as his father, and suddenly in the middle it would be cut the way you would cut a violin string, and you could watch Tom go whirling into darkness.
• he had carved a little face. The eyes and ears and lips were movable, and little perches connected them with the inside of the hollow head. At the bottom of the neck there was a hole closed by a cork. And this was very wonderful. You caught a fly and eased him through the hole and set the cork. And suddenly the head became alive. The eyes moved and the lips talked and the ears wiggled as the frantic fly crawled over the little perches.
• And I have no sound of his voice or words in my ear; he is dark and silent and hugely warm in my memory. <> Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound.
• And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly—well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
• And she looked forward to Heaven as a place where clothes did not get dirty and where food did not have to be cooked and dishes washed. Privately there were some things in Heaven of which she did not quite approve. There was too much singing, and she didn’t see how even the Elect could survive for very long the celestial laziness which was promised.
• They’re like two sides of a medal. Cal is sharp and dark and watchful, and his brother—well, he’s a boy you like before he speaks and like more afterwards.”
  “And you don’t like Cal?”
  “I find myself defending him—to myself. He’s fighting for his life and his brother doesn’t have to fight.”
• “Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” “I don’t know.” “Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
• I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It’s small mining—small mining. You’re too young a man to be panning memories, Adam.
• “I thank you, Adam,” he said. “The sweetness of your offer is a good smell on the west wind.”
• Lee said, “I think I see why that is. There is no woman in the house to put a value on babies. I don’t think men care much for babies, and so it was never an advantage to these boys to be babies. There was nothing to gain by it.
• And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.’ It was the ‘thou shalt’ that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin.”... Lee sipped his coffee. “Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible. It was very new then. And it was different in this passage. It says, ‘Do thou rule over him.’ Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order.
• “Well, it seemed to me that the man who could conceive this great story would know exactly what he wanted to say and there would be no confusion in his statement.” “You say ‘the man.’ Do you then not think this is a divine book written by the inky finger of God?” “I think the mind that could think this story was a curiously divine mind.
• “They are fine old men. They smoke their two pipes of opium in the afternoon and it rests and sharpens them, and they sit through the night and their minds are wonderful. I guess no other people have been able to use opium well.”
• “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’... But “Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”... Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.”
• And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because ‘Thou mayest.’ ”
• Lee said, “And you named him ‘Doxology.’ ” <> “Surely,” said Samuel, “so ill endowed a creature deserved, I thought, one grand possession. He hasn’t very long now.”
• “Careful, Lee, you’ll get me talking. I told you my Irish came and went. It’s coming now.”
  “It was your two-word retranslation, Lee—”Thou mayest.’ It took me by the throat and shook me. And when the dizziness was over, a path was open, new and bright. And my life which is ending seems to be going on to an ending wonderful. And my music has a new last melody like a bird song in the night.”...  Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. ‘Thou mayest, Thou mayest!’ What glory! It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth.
• “Look there. That’s a state senator. He thinks he’s going to run for Congress. Look at his fat stomach. He’s got bubs like a woman. He likes whips. That streak there—that’s a whip mark.
• Samuel’s funeral and the talk with Kate should have made Adam sad and bitter, but they did not. Out of the gray throbbing an ecstasy arose.
• “This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk.” <> “Maybe both of us have got a piece of him,” said Lee. “Maybe that’s what immortality is.”
• “I don’t think I’ve ever known what you people call happiness. We think of contentment as the desirable thing, and maybe that’s negative.”
• I would like to have in stock some of those dragon-carved blocks of ink from the dynasty of Sung. The boxes are worm-bored, and that ink is made from fir smoke and a glue that comes only from wild asses’ skin. When you paint with that ink it may physically be black but it suggests to your eye and persuades your seeing that it is all the colors in the world... Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.”
• “Don’t you want credit?” Cal asked subtly.
  “Well, not full credit. We could divide it up.”
  “After all, it was my arrow,” said Cal.
  “No, it wasn’t.”
  “You look at the feathers. See that nick? That’s mine.”
  “How did it get in my quiver? I don’t remember any nick.”
  “Maybe you don’t remember. But I’m going to give you credit anyway.”
  Aron said gratefully, “No, Cal. I don’t want that. We’ll say we both shot at once.”
• “Afraid to fight?”
  “No. I just don’t want to.”
  “If I was to say you was scared, would you want to call me a liar?”
  “No.”
  “Then you’re scared, aren’t you?”
  “I guess so.”
• Both boys leaned over and laughed hysterically. The rain roared on the oak trees in the home draw and the wind disturbed their high dignity.
• he could feel the relief on the part of the Bacons. It was not laziness if he was a rich man. Only the poor were lazy. Just as only the poor were ignorant. A rich man who didn’t know anything was spoiled or independent.
• Abra smiled with amusement at the myths of these country boys. “Eggs,” she said. “Ho! Eggs.” She didn’t say it loudly or harshly, but Lee’s theory tottered and swayed and then she brought it crashing down. “Which one of you is fried?” she asked. “And which one is poached?” <> The boys exchanged uneasy glances. It was their first experience with the inexorable logic of women, which is overwhelming even, or perhaps especially, when it is wrong.
• Aron said, “I’ll wash him off and put him in a box and tie him with string, and if you don’t want to eat him, you can have a funeral when you get time—in Salinas.” <> “I go to real funerals,” said Abra. “Went to one yesterday. There was flowers high as this roof.”
• If, on the other hand, Cal came upon the same anthill, he would kick it to pieces and watch while the frantic ants took care of their disaster. Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.
• “My father was a young man recently married, and his tie to his wife was very strong and deep and warm, and hers to him must have been—overwhelming. Nevertheless, with good manners they said good-by in the presence of the heads of the family. I have often thought that perhaps formal good manners may be a cushion against heartbreak.
• The country did not want them breeding. A man and a woman and a baby have a way of digging in, of pulling the earth where they are about them and scratching out a home. And then it takes all hell to root them out.
• Fifteen men were shot for being a little mutinous. <> “No—they kept order the way our poor species has ever learned to keep order. We think there must be better ways but we never learn them—always the whip, the rope, and the rifle.
• “I can see my father’s face when he told me. An old misery comes back, raw and full of pain. Telling it, my father had to stop and gain possession of himself, and when he continued he spoke sternly and he used hard sharp words almost as though he wanted to cut himself with them.
• She had not even eyes to see out of, but her mouth still moved and she gave him his instructions. My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails. She died on the shale in the afternoon.”... “Before you hate those men you must know this. My father always told it at the last: No child ever had such care as I. The whole camp became my mother. It is a beauty—a dreadful kind of beauty. And now good night. I can’t talk any more.”
• He was nineteen and chewed tobacco, and from his three months in automobile school he had gained a great though weary contempt for human beings. He spat and threw the lines at Lee.
• “Oh, Lord,” said the young man disgustedly. With a courageous gathering of his moral forces he moved with decision toward the car. “Might as well get started,” he said. “God knows how long it’s going to take if you ain’t studied.”
  Adam said, “Mr. Hamilton couldn’t start it last night.”
  “He always tries to start it on the magneto,” said the sage. “All right! All right, come along. Know the principles of a internal combustion engine?”
• Aron said excitedly, “I know! When we take flowers to our mother we’ll take some to our Uncle Charles.” And he said a little sadly, “I wish’t I knew I had him before he was dead.” He felt that he was growing rich in dead relatives.
• Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?”...
  “It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”
  “And memory.”
  “Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us.”
• I’m crotchety. I feel sand under my skin. I’m. looking forward to the ugly smell of old books and the sweet smell of good thinking. Faced with two sets of morals, you’ll follow your training. What you call thinking won’t change it. The fact that your wife is a whore in Salinas won’t change a thing.”
• “You know about the ugliness in people. You showed me the pictures. You use all the sad, weak parts of a man, and God knows he has them.”... “But you—yes, that’s right—you don’t know about the rest. You don’t believe I brought you the letter because I don’t want your money. You don’t believe I loved you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures—you don’t believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think—more than that, you’re sure—that’s all there is.”
• Come to think of it, none of the Hamiltons, with all their versatility, had any versatility in love. None of them seemed capable of light or changeable love.
  Dessie did not simply throw up her hands and give up. It was much worse than that. She went right on doing and being what she was—without the glow. The people who loved her ached for her, seeing her try, and they got to trying for her.
  Dessie’s friends were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad. In time the Mrs. Morrisons found unassailable reasons for not going to the little house by the bakery. They weren’t disloyal. They didn’t want to be sad as much as they wanted to be happy. It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.
• And Tom had cut Mollie’s tongue with his pocketknife and died in his heart when he realized his courage... Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men. His violence balanced his tenderness, and himself was a pitted battlefield of his own forces. He was confused now, but Dessie could hold his bit and point him, the way a handler points a thoroughbred at the barrier to show his breeding and his form.
• “It would be exploiting the young, wouldn’t it?”
  “Certainly it would,” Dessie agreed. “When I had my shop I exploited the girls who wanted to learn to sew—and they exploited me. I think I will call this The Great Monterey County Acorn Contest. And I won’t let everyone in. Maybe bicycles for prizes—wouldn’t you pick up acorns in hope of a bicycle, Tom?”
  “Sure I would,” he said. “But couldn’t we pay them too?”
  “Not with money,” Dessie said. “That would reduce it to labor, and they will not labor if they can help it, Nor will I.”
• Tom was depressed and sad. As always, Will had managed to chew up and spit out his enthusiasm. Will had pulled his lip, rubbed his eyebrows, scratched his nose, cleaned his glasses, and made a major operation of cutting and lighting a cigar. The pig proposition was full of holes, and Will was able to put his fingers in the holes.
• Not even Samuel could have held himself in more dignity than Tom as he rode back to the old house. A hawk driving down on a chicken with doubled fists did not make him turn his head.
• His mind walked in to face the accusers: Vanity, which charged him with being ill dressed and dirty and vulgar; and Lust, slipping him the money for his whoring; Dishonesty, to make him pretend to talent and thought he did not have; Laziness and Gluttony arm in arm. Tom felt comforted by these because they screened the great Gray One in the back seat, waiting—the gray and dreadful crime. He dredged up lesser things, used small sins almost like virtues to save himself.
• And here interpolated—it’s so hard to remember how you die or when. An eyebrow raised or a whisper—they may be it; or a night mottled with splashed light until powder-driven lead finds your secret and lets out the fluid in you.

---- part 4

• Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners.
• I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.
• In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. <> We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
• “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. They say a clean cut heals soonest. There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or hear or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.”
• In the schoolyard his very prettiness caused some difficulty until it was discovered by his testers that Aron was a dogged, steady, and completely fearless fighter, particularly when he was crying.
• The sharpest question she had asked, “How does it feel not to have a mother?” slipped into his mind. And how did it feel? It didn’t feel like anything. Ah, but in the schoolroom, at Christmas and graduation, when the mothers of other children came to the parties—then was the silent cry and the wordless longing. That’s what it was like.
• Salinas was surrounded and penetrated with swamps, with tule-filled ponds, and every pond spawned thousands of frogs. With the evening the air was so full of their song that it was a kind of roaring silence. It was a veil, a background, and its sudden disappearance, as after a clap of thunder, was a shocking thing.
• Lee’s voice said, “I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.”... His solution lay suddenly before him. Abra had not lied. She had told him only what she had heard, and her parents had only heard it too. He got to his feet and pushed his mother back into death and closed his mind against her.
• “I come from a whole goddam family of inventors,” said Will. “We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries. When we got a little ahead my father, or Tom, patented something. I’m the only one in the family, except my mother, who didn’t have ideas, and I’m the only one who ever made a dime.
• She stepped around in front of him and stopped him. “You look here, mister. You kiss me now.” “Why?” She said slowly, “So everybody will know that I’m Mrs. Lettuce-head.”
• When he was quite small Cal had discovered a secret. If he moved very quietly to where his father was sitting and if he leaned very lightly against his father’s knee, Adam’s hand would rise automatically and his fingers would caress Cal’s shoulder. It is probable that Adam did not even know he did it, but the caress brought such a raging flood of emotion to the boy that he saved this special joy and used it only when he needed it. It was a magic to be depended upon. It was the ceremonial symbol of a dogged adoration.
• “You’re right,” said Lee. “When the first innocence goes, you can’t stop—unless you’re a hypocrite or a fool. But I can’t tell you any more because I don’t know any more.
• “I think your father has in him, magnified, the things his wife lacks. I think in him kindness and conscience are so large that they are almost faults. They trip him up and hinder him.”
• “You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.”
• Cal wanted to throw his arms about his father, to hug him and to be hugged by him. He wanted some wild demonstration of sympathy and love. He picked up his wooden napkin ring and thrust his forefinger through it. “I’d tell you if you asked,” he said softly. <> “I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask! I’m as bad a father as my father was.”
• A miracle once it is familiar is no longer a miracle; Cal had lost his wonder at the golden relationship with his father but the pleasure remained. The poison of loneliness and the gnawing envy of the unlonely had gone out of him, and his person was clean and sweet, and he knew it was... In his new joy he appointed himself guardian of his father’s content.
• Cal froze in his steps. He was suspended in time, barely breathing. Then he began a practice he had learned when he was very young. He observed and catalogued details outside his main object. He noticed how the wind from the south bent over the new little leaves of the tall privet bush. He saw the muddy path beaten to black mush by many feet, and Kate’s feet standing far to the side out of the mud... He did not know his own face well enough to recognize her mouth and little teeth and wide cheekbones as his own. They stood thus for the moment, between two gusts of the southern wind.
• Cal said, “I don’t think the light hurts your eyes. I think you’re afraid.”
  “Get out!” she cried. “Go on, get out!”
  “I’m going.” He had his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re afraid.”
• She thought suddenly of the only person who had ever made her feel this panic hatred. It was Samuel Hamilton, with his white beard and his pink cheeks and the laughing eyes that lifted her skin and looked underneath.
• The nation slid imperceptibly toward war, frightened and at the same time attracted. People had not felt the shaking emotion of war in nearly sixty years.
• And then Cal did something Will Hamilton approved even more. He used candor as a weapon. He said, “I want to make a lot of money. I want you to tell me how.”
• He did not move slowly over the past, it was all there in one flash, all of the years, a picture, a feeling and a despair, all stopped the way a fast camera stops the world. There was the flashing Samuel, beautiful as dawn with a fancy like a swallow’s flight, and the brilliant, brooding Tom who was dark fire, Una who rode the storms, and the lovely Mollie, Dessie of laughter, George handsome and with a sweetness that filled a room like the perfume of flowers, and there was Joe, the youngest, the beloved. Each one without effort brought some gift into the family. <> Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired.
• Will had sensed his family but he had not understood them. And they had accepted him without knowing there was anything to understand. And now this boy came along. Will understood him, felt him, sensed him, recognized him. This was the son he should have had, or the brother, or the father. And the cold wind of memory changed to a warmth toward Cal which gripped him in the stomach and pushed up against his lungs.
• Recently he went into hiding for his health and he learned to cook. You stand the melon in a pot, cut off the top carefully, put in a whole chicken, mushrooms, water chestnuts, leeks, and just a touch of ginger. Then you put the top back on the melon and cook it as slowly as possible for two days. Ought to be good.”
• “Cal’s trying to find himself,” said Lee. “I guess this personal hide-and-seek is not unusual. And some people are ‘it’ all their lives—hopelessly ‘it’.”
• Lee put his arm around the broad shoulders to comfort him. “You’re growing up. Maybe that’s it,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror. But that’s not the worst. We think everybody is seeing into us. Then dirt is very dirty and purity is shining white. Aron, it will be over. Wait only a little while and it will be over. That’s not much relief to you because you don’t believe it, but it’s the best I can do for you. Try to believe that things are neither so good nor so bad as they seem to you now.
• “I don’t care what you do as long as I don’t have anything to do with it. I guess no matter how weak and negative a good man is, he has as many sins on him as he can bear. I have enough sins to trouble me. Maybe they aren’t very fine sins compared to some, but, the way I feel, they’re all I can take care of.
• Even before the first magistrate looked down on him, Joe had developed a fine stable of hates toward the whole world he knew. <> Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant. Joe early developed a gentle protective love for Joe. He comforted and flattered and cherished Joe. He set up walls to save Joe from a hostile world. And gradually Joe became proof against wrong.
• look at him—a rap against him, working in a whorehouse when other men had homes and cars. They were safe and happy and at night their blinds were pulled down against Joe. He wept quietly until he fell asleep.

---- Part 5

• There were Minute Men too, so called because they made one-minute speeches in favor of America in moving-picture theaters and in churches. They had buttons too. <> The women rolled bandages and
• We used every cruelty we could think of on Mr. Fenchel. He was our German. He passed our house every day, and there had been a time when he spoke to every man and woman and child and dog, and everyone had answered. Now no one spoke to him, and I can see now in my mind his tubby loneliness and his face full of hurt pride.
• “I don’t want blame.” <> “Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn’t carry any pleasant egotism.”
• “It set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.”
  “That’s lonely.”
  “All great and precious things are lonely.”
  “What is the word again?”
  “Timshel—thou mayest.”
• Leland Stanford University was not like that. A formal square of brown sandstone blocks set down in a hayfield; a church with an Italian mosaic front; classrooms of varnished pine; and the great world of struggle and anger re-enacted in the rise and fall of fraternities. And those bright angels were youths in dirty corduroy trousers, some study-raddled and some learning the small vices of their fathers.
• of Abra he made his immaculate dream and, having created her, fell in love with her. At night when his studying was over he went to his nightly letter to her as one goes to a scented bath.
• An institution was gone from Salinas, dark and fatal sex, as hopeless and deeply hurtful as human sacrifice. Jenny’s place would still jangle with honky-tonk and rock with belching laughter. Kate’s would rip the nerves to a sinful ecstasy and leave a man shaken and weak and frightened at himself. But the somber mystery of connection that was like a voodoo offering was gone forever.
• Joe thought of his bumbling father—because he remembered something the old man had told him. “Look out for a soup carrier,” Joe’s father had said. “Take one of them dames that’s always carrying soup to somebody—she wants something, and don’t you forget it.”
• There was pride in it, and relief too. The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?”
• Aron: He felt let down and helpless, packed like a bird’s egg in the cotton of his father’s ambition for him. He had not known its strength until tonight, and he wondered whether he would have the strength to break free of its soft, persistent force.
• Cal uncovered his present. He counted the fifteen new bills once more, and they were so crisp they made a sharp, cracking sound. The Monterey County Bank had to send to San Francisco to get them, and only did so when the reason for them was told. It was a matter of shock and disbelief to the bank that a seventeen-year-old boy should, first, own them, and, second, carry them about. Bankers do not like money to be lightly handled even if the handling is sentimental.
• Without effort, Aron was taking his day away from him. It would turn out to be Aron’s day. Then, suddenly, he was bitterly ashamed. He covered his eyes with his hands and he said, “It’s just jealousy. I’m jealous. That’s what I am. I’m jealous. I don’t want to be jealous.” And he repeated over and over, “Jealous—jealous—jealous,” as though bringing it into the open might destroy it. And having gone this far, he proceeded with his self-punishment. “Why am I giving the money to my father? Is it for his good? No. It’s for my good. Will Hamilton said it—I’m trying to buy him. There’s not one decent thing about it.
• They wouldn’t miss me. In a little while they’d forget I ever existed—all except Lee. And I wonder whether Lee likes me. Maybe not.” He doubled his fists against his forehead. “Does Aron have to fight himself like this?... Cal’s mind careened in anger at himself and in pity for himself. And then a new voice came into it, saying coolly and with contempt, “If you’re being honest—why not say you are enjoying this beating you’re giving yourself?
• “Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn’t be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well.”... “Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small,” said Lee. “Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they’re becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses—the whole world over his fence.”
• No, if college is where a man can go to find his relation to his whole world, I don’t object.
• “Robbed?” Cal cried. “Why, we paid them two cents a pound over the market. We didn’t rob them.” Cal felt suspended in space, and time seemed very slow. <> His father took a long time to answer. There seemed to be long spaces between his words. “I send boys out,” he said. “I sign my name and they go out. And some will die and some will lie helpless without arms and legs. Not one will come back untorn. Son, do you think I could take a profit on that?”
• I would have been so happy if you could have given me—well, what your brother has—pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn’t stack up with that.” His eyes widened a little and he said, “Have I made you angry, son? Don’t be angry. If you want to give me a present—give me a good life. That would be something I could value.”
• “He couldn’t help it, Cal. That’s his nature. It was the only way he knew. He didn’t have any choice. But you have. Don’t you hear me? You have a choice.” <> The spirals had become so small that the pencil lines ran together and the result was a shiny black dot.
• Kate shook her head sadly, remembering the cut-off little girl. She wondered why she had forgotten that wonderful trick. It had saved her from so many disasters. The light filtering down at one through a clover-leaf was glorious. Cathy and Alice walked among towering grass, arms around each other—best friends. And Cathy never had to drink all of “Drink me” because she had Alice.
• His visitor looked at the sheriff, and Quinn knew that there was no power on earth that could keep this man from hating him. For the rest of their lives there would be a barrier between them, and neither one could ever admit it.
  “Horace, I don’t know how to thank you.”
  And the sheriff said in sorrow, “That’s all right. It’s what I’d want my friends to do for me.”
• Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. <> “Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” ... Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it.
• Dirty in your habits, and curiously pure in your mind. Maybe you have a little more energy than most, just energy, but outside of that you’re very like all the other snot-nose kids. Are you trying to attract dignity and tragedy to yourself because your mother was a whore? And if anything should have happened to your brother, will you be able to sneak for yourself the eminence of being a murderer, snot-nose?” <> Cal turned slowly back to his desk. Lee watched him, holding his breath the way a doctor watches for the reaction to a hypodermic. Lee could see the reactions flaring through Cal—the rage at insult, the belligerence, and the hurt feelings following behind and out of that—just the beginning of relief.
• “We’re a violent people, Cal. Does it seem strange to you that I include myself? Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.” <>  All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed—selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful—we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.
• “I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on. And, Cal—we were kind of strangers. We kept it going because we were used to it. But I didn’t believe the story any more.” “How about Aron?” “He was going to have it come out his way if he had to tear the world up by the roots.” ... He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s not how he wanted the story to go—and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world. It’s the same way he tore me up—Abra—when he wanted to be a priest.”
• And he wondered what Adam meant, saying his father was a thief. Part of the dream, maybe. And then Lee’s mind played on the way it often did. Suppose it were true—Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money... now this second will, and Aron, whose purity was a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and the balance was re-established?
• the Mexican name for carnations. Somebody must have told him when he was a kid. They were called Nails of Love—and marigolds, the Nails of Death.
• asked questions with the same unwavering intensity as when he had trapped and pelted and cured a Hebrew verb. Dr. H. C. Murphy had got to know Lee very well and had gone from a professional impatience with a Chinese servant to a genuine admiration for a scholar. Dr. Murphy had even borrowed some of Lee’s news separates and reports on diagnosis and practice. He told Dr. Edwards, “That Chink knows more about the pathology of cerebral hemorrhage than I do, and I bet as much as you do.” He spoke with a kind of affectionate anger that this should be so.
• “Something to take my mind off my feet.” “I’ll bring the coffee to you. I’ve got some dirty stories written by a French queen. {????}
• He said, “When Samuel Hamilton died the world went out like a candle. I relighted it to see his lovely creations, and I saw his children tossed and torn and destroyed as though some vengefulness was at work.
• “Maybe you’ll come to know that every man in every generation is refired. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect cup—thin, strong, translucent?” He held his cup to the light. “All impurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that—more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection,” He drained his cup and he said loudly, “Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us—would stop trying?”
• His lips parted and failed and tried again. Then his lungs filled. He expelled the air and his lips combed the rushing sigh. His whispered word seemed to hang in the air: “Timshel!”
• They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

//My favorite relationship was Tom and Dessie’s tragic relationship that was kind of an anti-version of Cain and Abel.
//East of Eden brought up a point that I hadn’t noticed before.  We are Cain’s children.  Cain lived and had children. Abel didn’t.  And we all have to face rejection like Cain did.