“[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that…such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed toward the adjustment of modern society to modern methods”

“Pay attention to the intricate patterns of your existence that you take for granted.”

“ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.”

“America’s intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They’re all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.”

“Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.”

“Snowflakes are pretty patterns etched in water’s dreams.”

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”