What do you think?
Rate this book
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
“Evening had descended quickly, and because in the presence of my daughter the darkness was suddenly embarrassing, I went to the desk and switched on the lamp. The bulb is a small one, and standing in its weak light with my daughter behind me, I was seized, as I sometimes am, with sadness. I suppose I wax wondering, although it is strange for me to admit it, why, of all the lives that might have been mine, I have led the one I have just described.”
“They dried themselves with their shirts, whispering a few words in their language while I listened with my eyes closed. Sandra still slept, waking now and then to turn herself over. I heard Clive and Elliot wringing out their hair and lying down on the rocks, and then the small, steady splash of pebbles being tossed into the water and Clive humming a Clapton lick between throws. Lethargy welled over me. Just before I slept I was aware of all the smallest sounds of the quarry--the tiny chime of lapping waves, my brother's humming, the occasional groan of rock shifting in the heat and the plink of pebbles in the water. Sandra snored, just slightly. When I woke the sun was gone.”
“In the days that followed he did not feel sad exactly, just blank, as though if he could not report to Abbie about the events of his life, they had not really happened. He cried for the first time since the death of his father, but the tears did not seem to come from sadness nor to relieve it. They seemed biological, and he watched them, like symptoms.”
“When they read of the reign of Augustus Caesar, when they learn that his rule was bolstered by commerce, a postal system, and the arts, by the reformation of the senate and by the righting of an inequitable system of taxation, when they see the effect of scientific progress through the census and the enviable network of Roman roads, how these advances led mankind away from the brutish rivalries of potentates into the two centuries of Pax Romana, then they understand the importance of character and high ideals."