Seán-Paul’s Reviews > Slouching Towards Bethlehem > Status Update

“If we have been taught to keep our promises—if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough—we stay with the body, or have bad dreams.” - p. 158

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” - p. 139

“At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling.” - p. 123

“Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.” - p. 71

“This openness, this vulnerability, is of course precisely the reason why she is so able to ‘come through’ to all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood.” - pp. 57-58

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” - p. 4