Take this passage, from the prologue: "Tip your chair back, stare into the eyes of someone hateful that you'll take home anyway.
Take this passage about Schumann: "He's got his antidepressants in one hand and a sack lunch with a Walmart enchilada and a Mountain Dew in the other.
Take this passage, which comes at the very end of the oneiric history of sadness and futility that he presents in "The Rings of Saturn".
Take this passage from Michael Kinsley's 2008 essay on aging: On an airplane seven or eight years ago, I turned and discovered Robert McNamara in the next seat.
Take this passage from "Fade to Blonde": "He wore a snowy white shirt, a dark red tie figured in dull silver, and a quiet charcoal suit that must have cost more than any car I've ever owned.
Take this passage, in which Frank is fighting for April to keep her pregnancy: But before long his voice had started to work again; almost independently of his will, it had fallen back and begun to employ his final tactic, the dangerous last-ditch maneuver he had hoped to hold in reserve against the possibility of defeat.
Take this passage:What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism We need intellectual leaders who are willing to fight for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realisation.
Take this passage from Bind Your Hair (1964), where a young woman wakes up depressed on a visit to her fiancé's parents in the countryside: "Then she got up, turned on the big electric heater, and felt that her thoughts had been the morbid produce of lying too long abed.
Take this passage, transcribed from the journal Thomas kept during her first visit to the Ju/wasi in 1950: "I am alone an hour's walk from camp... listening to the wind moving the grass and to something going huff, huff, miles away — a lion — and looking at the hazy gray sky.
While all commentators take this passage as fundamental, their interpretations vary, sometimes widely.
