How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously. They would simply fire and forget me as soon as I tried. They would file me away. That's what will happen to Martha the typist when she finally goes away. She'll be fired and forgotten. She'll be filed away. (2.18)
Those who leave the company or are fired are easily replaced and forgotten. If Slocum is harboring any thoughts about going rogue and upsetting company norms, he had better let them go. His actions wouldn't even cause a dent, and he would quickly be dismissed and forgotten.
Quote #2
It would have passed, sooner or later, just as she has passed already, just as I am passing now. (Fuck her, she's dead.) Her case it closed. If she didn't kill herself, she'd be older than I am now and probably a pest; she would be stout and wrinkled and suffer from constipation, gallstones, menopause disturbances, and bunioned feet, and I more than likely would not wish to see her. Everything passes. (That's what makes it endurable.) (3.43)
Virginia may be dead, but to Slocum, she is not buried. She is very much alive in his mind. Slocum laments that it's the inevitable passing of all things that makes life more bearable and that stamps out any lingering memories that cause internal strife.
Quote #3
I am lacking in sequence for everything but my succession of jobs, love affairs, and fornications; and these are not important; none matters more than any of the others; except that they do give me some sense of a connected past. (4.8)
Slocum's style of storytelling is rather fragmented, and he says here that the actual sequence of events from his past doesn't really matter much. What matters most is that these events happened, and when added together, they constitute his being.
Quote #4
I know how it feels to have to begin speculating ominously weeks before each summer ends and the new school year begins about the innumerable ordeals massing ahead of him. (I know how it feels to be notified of an office meeting scheduled to take place and have no idea what it's going to be about.) (5.10)
Fear is somewhat cyclical, or at any rate something to be expected. Slocum is all too familiar with the annual fears his son experiences at the start of a new school year. Those can be some of the scariest moments of anyone's childhood.
Quote #5
Somehow, the time always passes (doesn't it, with no help from us and in spite of anything that is going on, as it passes for me now at the company, as it passed ultimately for my much younger daughter then away at camp, and passes now uneventfully for my wife at home with the help of a sneaky and avenging slurp from the wine bottle every half hour or so during the morning and afternoon and an energetic bang in the box from me at night one or two times a week or so if I come home and feel up to it…). (5.159)
Ever think to yourself at midnight on New Year's Eve, "Wow! I can't believe it's [insert year here]"? That's exactly how Slocum feels. The years pile on and blur together, and he's left wondering how it all passed by so quickly—and so meaninglessly.
Quote #6
I was inconvenienced yesterday when a man my age was killed in a subway station nearby and caused a traffic jam that made me late for a cocktail party with salesmen at which I was expected to be early. (5.204)
Slocum feels inconvenienced when plans are changed or when things fall out of routine. Gee, we figure something like death would register as more than just a disruption of your daily commute…
Quote #7
And life has pretty much been one damned sterile office desk after another for me ever since, apart from those few good years I spent away from home in the army. (6.6)
Where Prufrock measures time in coffee spoons, Slocum measures it in office spaces. That's…almost too depressing to think about.
Quote #8
I am an illustrated flow chart. I have my wife, my daughter, and my son for reference: I am all their ages. They are me. (But I'm not them. They'll run through sequences obligingly for me as many times as I want to view them.) (6.85)
Slocum can time hop and jump from one event to the next in nonlinear fashion. He can be multiple people at once, or he can just be himself, whoever that is. Here he easily manipulates time and the role he plays in it, and he does so with comfort and ease.
Quote #9
"As far as the company is concerned, no one needs anyone. It goes on by itself. It doesn't need us. We need it." (6.126)
Green points this out to Slocum, who agrees that nothing anyone does at the office affects matters at all. Everyone is just a worker bee buzzing around a hive. "It's a honeycomb; we drone. Directors die; they're replaced" (6.130). If someone dies, time will wash that person away, and a new person will readily come and take his or her place.
Quote #10
I think Penny might kill herself without much fuss a few years from now if something engrossing and lasting doesn't happy to her soon—I can't help much. (6.232)
Time can be quite cruel to women, and they seem to place a time stamp on themselves. Virginia ended things before she could get too old and undesirable, and perhaps the aging and still single Penny might do the same before time takes its toll on her.