How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Most of the guests at the Hotel Gloriana were past the age of retirement. Along Broadway in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, a great part of New York's vast population of old men and women lives. Unless the weather is too cold or wet they fill the benches about the tiny railed parks and along the subway gratings from Verdi Square to Columbia university, they crowd the shops and cafeterias, the dime stores, the tearooms, the bakeries, the beauty parlors, the reading rooms and club rooms. (1.2)
Living in Wilhelm's neighborhood must feel something like being surrounded by thousands of Betty Whites, Kirk Douglases, Angela Lansburys, George Takeis, and other magnificent old people. Sign us up!
Quote #2
Some had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California. He himself had been one of those loose objects. (1.50)
There's not a lot of love for Los Angeles in Seize the Day, and whether it's because LA is the place where Wilhelm's life first started to take a nosedive, or whether it's because New York is just better. What do you think? Has the novel got a little bit of an East versus West rivalry going on? We wonder what Katy Perry might have to say about this.
Quote #3
They came into the sunshine of upper Broadway, not clear but throbbing through the dust and fumes, a false air of gas visible at eye level as it spurted from the bursting buses. From old habit, Wilhelm turned up the collar of his jacket. (4.113)
The New York City air is "throbbing" with dust and fumes, and gas is "spurting" from "bursting buses." Just get a load of the extraordinary "body" language that Saul Bellow is using here. Is this pollution gross or what?