“Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”

“What can be called "consciousness of the process of abstraction." That is, consciousness of the fact that out of a virtually infinite universe of possible things to pay attention to, we abstract only certain portions, and those portions turn out to be the ones for which we have verbal labels and categories. What we abstract, i. e., "see," and how we abstract it, or see it, or see it or think about it, is for all practical purposes inseparable from how we talk about it.”

“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

“When we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather to abstract from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determinism.”

“Friends are found on the battlefield, and unfortunately friends are also lost. And where do we find the measure of that sacrifice? How can we account for the value of that loss? Sometimes we can find an answer in our sense of country, at other times in our Corps. But clearly we can see it in the lives that were able to continue due to the acts of others who were not so fortunate.”

“We must act out passion before we can feel it.”

“The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.”

“A number of abstract ideas, of which we are as a matter of fact unconscious. We do not see them, but we see other things through them.”

“We were rebuilding the nation, looking to a more just society. It was a time when many of us were going to the villages to live there. We were a generation that had no confusion in our minds as to how to do things. Gandhiji had shown the way. This atmosphere infused politics and the way we did things.”

“Not into older guys, huh?" asked Adrian once we were alone.
"You're imagining things," I said. "Clearly, my stunning beauty has clouded your mind.”