I greatly enjoyed this excerpt from The Pale King. I’d recommend reading this rather than the entire novel. It was because I enjoyed this excerpt so much that I decided to read the entire novel and took notes here.

p12 “…her hatred of traditional insitutions and authority…”

p13 “I remember once, in I think 1975 or ‘76, shaving off just one sideburn and going around like that for a period of time, believing the one sideburn make me a nonconformist…”

p14 “wastoid”

p18 “…I can also recall smoking pot with my mother and her partner…it was more of a sort of liberated political statement than a matter of getting high…”

p33 Uses the phrase “The Service” like working for the IRS is like enlisting to go to war.

p38 “My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’”

p40 “…I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room.”

p41 “If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.”

p48 “It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, that fact that it’s a choice… there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary phsychological impulses for pleasure and vanity…”

p53 “…questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death…”

p103 “‘To experience commitment as the los of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility…Childhood’s end. The first of many deaths.”

p109 “Yesterday’s hero pushed back at bounds and frontiers…Yesterday’s society’s heroes generated facts…the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts…the pie has been made – the contest is now in the slicing.”