How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"Well, then." She drew a deep breath. "If I don't go—or if I do go—will I get social leprosy?"
"Depends on who you want it with. If you do go you get social leprosy with the drama types, the school paper, the Poetry Club, and both the serious intellectuals […]
On the other hand, if you don't go to the First Day Dance, you get social leprosy with the socials, the jocks, the Glee Club fairies, the hoods'n'sluts, and all the clubs that begin with F." (5.65-66, 68)
Dude, Lightsburg High has more cliques than the school in Mean Girls. Their names are definitely more creative, and there are legitimate threats of social leprosy in relation to going to school dances. That's pretty serious.
Quote #8
In one of the dozen or so inhabited houses that huddled around one side street, an old lady named Rose Carson had a sofa that needed re-covered. Browning had gone to high school with her; that was where he got a lot of his business, people he'd known in school. I figured that was probably how he'd gotten his big break, when he re-covered Moses's living room set. (10.50)
Newsflash—they had cliques roughly a million years ago, too … or at least when Browning was a teenager back in the Dark Ages.
Quote #9
"Karl, you're such a baby. Grow up. It's a therapy group, okay? A therapy group. Where they put weird loser kids. We don't have some kind of mystical magical Madman mystique. It's not the club where all the geeks get to be special. What it is, is where f***ed-up kids go." (15.93)
We know Paul is trying to run his own version of Operation Be Normal, but there's something in this passage that tells us he's trying to convince himself of all this more than he's trying to convince Karl. Remember, Paul doesn't really want to leave the Madmen—which means he probably needs to preach to himself about it even more.