How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
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.