The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right, he was hanging in there. She was a year older, she was twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew

The light outside was the sort of light that makes you turn on your headlights but then keeps them from doing any good because technically it’s still light out.

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism.’

His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways.

‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.’

This was partly due to the substitute’s presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or ‘connecting’ with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not

One of the quirks of real human memory is that the most vivid, detailed recall doesn’t usually concern the things that are most germane. The as it were forest. It’s not just that real memory is fragmentary; I think it’s also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years la

The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.

What had kept his father from being an actual alcoholic was that being an actual alcoholic would have taken too much effort.