It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

'You know Adam?' Teddy asked him. 'Do I know who?' 'Adam. In the Bible.' Nicholson smiled. 'Not personally,' he said dryly.

The religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

'You love God, don't you?' Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. 'Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from wha…

We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. …

Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and that no one is alive.

Oh how the Vacancy Laughed at them rushing by. 'Turn again, flesh and brain, Only yourselves again! How far above the ape Differing in each shape, You with you…