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Spain is in truth no more unique, biologically or intellectually, than any other country. Her differences from other nations have derived from her slow development as a nation. Spanish troubles have always been European troubles. All the Spanish civil wars have indeed been engagements in that general European civil war which has lasted since the Renaissance.

There were now not two Spains but two thousand. The geographical differences within Spain were a prime factor in the social disintegration of the nation. Regional feeling had sown the wind and now reaped the whirlwind.

All nations, however, are forever scarred by the epoch when they have been great.

This County-DA exercise really looked to Doc like pissants versus elephants. You could catch the FBI in the act of sodomizing the president in the Lincoln Memorial at high noon and local law enforcement would still just have to stand around and watch, getting more or less nauseated depending on which president.

Arrepentimiento. Spanish for 'sorry about that.' His idea was, anybody could go live there for free, didn't matter who you were, show up and if there's a unit open it's yours, overnight, forever, et cetera et cetera, and so forth as the King of Siam always sez.

The eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress ... all wheeling along together.

I wanted to see your face. I wanted to know it so I'd never forget it. Someday I'm going to watch it turn blue or maybe bleed to death. Your eyes'll get all wide and sticky and your tongue will hang out and I won't be making any mistake about it being the wrong joe. Think about it Carl, especially when you go to bed at night.

As she said it, she wondered about her breasts. Why was everyone so interested in them? What was so special about them? They were just ordinary size, after all, if that, and average shape. Why did everyone have to go on as if the word had got round that there were actually three of them?

Patrick pulled up outside the Thompsons' house and got out in a hurry, slamming the door viciously behind him. He had felt the wing of the angel of marriage brush his cheek, and was afraid.

That was all right, in fact very much better than all right, but it did not go on being all right for very long. The greedy way he murmured, 'Ooh, aren't you lovely? Ooh, aren't you beautiful? Ooh' into her ear was not quite so all right as the kiss itself, and the confident suddenness with which he put his hand on her breast was not at all all right.

Tessa arrived looking magnificent. She was thirty-three years old, but she looked ten years younger than that. Whatever Tessa was doing, it seemed to be good for her. She had wonderful skin and light fair hair that she wore long so that it broke over her shoulders. Even the most blasé waiter turned his head to watch her as she kissed me with extravagant hugs and sighs before sitting down.

[G]allivanting around the world in a small boat is a continuing education in one's limitless capacity for self-delusion. You mistake deep water for shallow. You confidently identify that headland over there as being this one right here on the chart—and for the next few minutes, you busily assemble every visible landform into the shape of what ought to be, and everything appears to fit. You'll be in for a big surprise

Bazarov had a great love for women and for feminine beauty; but love in the ideal, or as he expressed it, romantic sense, he called lunacy, unpardonable imbecility; he regarded chivalrous sentiments as something in the nature of deformity or disease....

The sea provided the Indians with a neighborhood, around which they loitered, scuffed their heels, and traded small talk. While its lower depths harbored beings, like Komogwa, as dangerous and mercurial in character as those of the deep forest, the water's surface was a broad public arena on which most of daily life took place.

No state can develop without the help of the sciences. It will be wiped out by its neighbors. Without art and culture a state will lose its capacity for self-evaluation, will give impetus to the wrong drifts, will constantly bring forth hypocrites and scoundrels, encourage the development of overconsumption of goods by its citizens, engender arrogance and eventually fall victim in turn to some bolder neighbor.

Seen them? Why, man alive! I spend all my spare time trying to slip up on her when she ain't looking to see them some more. Seen them? Man alive! Just like a rabbit likes clover! And when you've seen them once, that's only the start. You can't sit calm and peaceful and think about nothing else till you see them again.

When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing for the Creator to do.

As if we had each received a signal on a common wavelength, we turned and looked at Helen Haggerty's body. It seemed small and lonely at the far end of the room. Our joint flight with it through cloudy space had been going on for a long time. I looked at my watch. It was only nine-thirty-one, fourteen minutes since our arrival. Time seemed to have slowed down, dividing itself into innumerable fractions...

I, who am a philosopher in my own way, I watch them go by and I say to myself: "Ah we're going to see this again, we're going to see that again," and it never fails to occur. Unless there's a catastrophe—the war or the Spanish influenza, but even they don't surprise me. All that, that's the business of the planets. The planets go round in circles just like people do.

Turquedenne had not the slightest remembrance of July. Later this amazed him, and he tried to think what he could well have been doing during that time but never managed to remember. It always seemed to him that there had been a nonexistent month in his life, thirty days that oblivion had eradicated the way vultures gouge out the eyes of dead cattle. And so July disappeared, swallowed up by nothingness.

Turquedenne had not the slightest remembrance of July. Later this amazed hi,, and he tried to think what he could well have been doing during that time but never managed to remember. It always seemed to him that there had been a nonexistent month in his life, thirty days that oblivion had eradicated the way vultures gouge out the eyes of dead cattle. And so July disappeared, swallowed up by nothingness.

When you look into the abyss the abyss looks into you. You know all the cliches. They're cliches because they're true. You don't go into the darkness without it going into you and taking its piece. Bosch may have gone in too many times. He's lost his way.

periodically he exhumed Mr. Corson's perfectly embalmed body, just to see how he was getting on. It was good to see old Corson again.

There were strange sounds and stranger odors. One woman, washing her clothes, witnessed the soap bubbles crash to the floor and shatter. Two men smoking their pipes while discussing the affairs of the day found their rising smoke to be solid like a screen. Another man put his arm through the wall of his house. A young girl listening to her radio related how the music changed into a "funny smell."

Some went out forever, some went screaming down the alleys of the mad where cockroaches drive like Volkswagens on the oilcloth of the moon, gluttons found vertigo in centrifuges of consciousness, vomitoriums of ingestion; others found love, some manifest of love in light, in shards of Nirvana, sparks of satori...

It was [Eugene] McCarthy's turn to speak. Everyone leaned forward. The confrontation was at hand. But McCarthy, receiving no inner voice, drinking some bitter cup of rejection or despair, a simple distaste for the whole human race backing up in him, contented himself in remarking in his most penurious tones, "The people know my position."

It's as if she vanished into thin air. The surveillance system doesn't show her anywhere near the camp and we've turned the whole place upside down but she's nowhere to be found. Vanished into thin air. And we're dismantling the system so we won't be able to use it any more.

The chain rattled. The briefcase was weighing him down. It was handcuffed to his wrist. He no longer held the handle but let the case drag on its chain. The handcuff chafed his wrist but he did not care. He was past caring.

At dawn, when locomotives call, even from far away, they give the impression they're so close you could hug them against your chest. Other sounds too. And the silence. And the smells. And the voices that whisper miles away: everything close by, clear, transparent and fragile, made of glass.