Of all the ugly things I have to tell, (* stored up ripe and rotting in my memory,*) being expelled from that school is in a way the most shameful.
A man can admit with a cheerful shrug of his shoulders to larceny, wife-beating, treason, even murder (as I am to do shortly), but trivialities concerning his honor arouse the most shame. This is because (* the ego's threads of radiation never quite stop,*..) even in the most depraved of us, and we must always think, "Yes, but (..* my essential honor wasn't touched.*) Yes, but my dignity wasn't touched. Yes, but ... But ..."
p.172: ... I was entrusted with the road map, which (* looked like the plan for the intestines of a giant insect,*) and off we drove into the sunset. Father drove well, just like Mr. Hofstadter. He did not look back. I did not look back. But (* I could see in my mind's eye *) the placid winding streets (ways, lanes, drives) of Fernwood (* leading back farther and farther into the dimness of the past *) I had already spent there, from January to April of an uneneventful year for Fernwood but a year to end all other years in my life.
p.202:
I am playing with my doll. Inside, Mommy is still canning cherries. ... Once I liked cherries, but the last time they made me sick. I saw a little worm in a cherry, by the pit. Twenty-five years from now I will drive by cherry orchards and the nausea will rise up in me; a tiny white worm. (* My mind will always be pushed back to this farm,*..) and there is nothing I can do about it. (..* I will never be able to get away.*)
p.214:
Without her writing she [the narrating man's mother] would have been just Nada in the kitchen, Nada in her bathrobe upstairs, ... Yes, I would have loved her the way I loved Father, though probably more than I loved Father, but when I could read what she had written, (* creep and crawl and snuggle inside her brain,*) I began to see that the Nada who lived with us was just another visitor in our house, ... That Nada was pretending. ... [W]asn't she always growing vague, remote, her gaze drifting away to the ceiling, ...? ... No, the woman I called "Nada" (that stupid name, she was right) was just (* a liar. She cheated all the time.*)
You who've never read the secret words of the familiar, domesticated people you love, you who've never (* snuggled into their brains and looked out through their eyes,*) how can you understand what I felt? It's as if (* I had opened a door *) and saw Nada not as she wanted to seem to us, but Nada as she really was, a stranger, a person Father and I did not know and had no connection with.
[p.215:] We are accustomed to people (* existing in orbit around us,*..) and we dread thinking of their deaths because of (..* the slight tug we will feel when their presence is gone---we'll be drawn out closer to the frigidity of darkness, space, death.*..) We are accustomed to (..* these smaller planets always showing the same sides to us,*) familiar, predictable, secure, sound, sane, accommodating, but when (* I looked through Nada's eyes *) I knew that I had been tricked, that she showed only her narrowest, most ignorant side to me, and that she had (* cheated all my life.*)