“He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted.”

“Put your shoulder to the wheel.”

“America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

“One seldom recognizes the devil when he is putting his hand on your shoulder.”

“He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son… all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.”

“He's a good fighter and everything, but he's where he's at because of the push he's getting. I had to put in a lot of work and there ain't no push.”

“His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’
‘Tuan?’
‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow….”

“He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him.”

“Life is an ever-rolling wheel
And every day is the right one.
He who recites poems at his death
Adds frost to snow.”

“The usual thing — the statistically normal thing — is for the speaker to tell the graduating class that they are going out into a world torn by dissent, racked by problems of unprecedented knottiness and difficulty, and headed for the abyss of destruction unless the graduating class shoulders its burden and does something splendid to put everything right. The speaker generally admits that he is at the end of his tether: he is old, and broken on the wheel of Fate; his decrepitude and his wounds have been received in this great battle with the world's problems. Nothing — absolutely nothing — is to be expected of him in the future. From his failing hands he throws the torch; he plants the task of setting the world right square on the graduating class. He says that he does it with confidence. But he is usually so gloomy that one wonders how much his confidence is worth. Sometimes one gets the impression that immediately after Convocation he is going home to die.”