How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"How do you know you haven't been asleep your whole life? How do you know you're not asleep right now?" he said, watching me intently. (P.63)
And so it begins: Socrates messing with Dan's head. The teacher's questions are geared toward startling the youth out of his complacent acceptance of the ordinary, goal-oriented reality he's familiar with, so that he can really hear Socrates' point of view. Plus, the old man believes that only those who follow his path are truly awakened to life.
Quote #2
"I want to be a champion gymnast. I want my team to win the national championships. I want to graduate in good standing, and that means books to read and papers to write. What you seem to be offering me instead of staying up half the night in a gas station, listening to—I hope you won't take this as an insult—a very strange man who wants to draw me into his fantasy world. It's crazy!"
"Yes," he smiled sadly, "it is crazy." [...]
I realized then that the crazy world that Socrates had referred to was not his world at all, but mine. (P.197-204)
So here we have two starkly different versions of reality. Which one is real? Dan has his long list of goals, and Socrates has his strange, calm peace at the gas station. Which reality is the crazy one? The story makes its position very clear: Socrates is right about everything. Do you agree?
Quote #3
I lost myself in the semester's last classes. My hours in the gym were spent in the hardest training I'd ever done. Whenever I stopped pushing myself, my thoughts and feelings began to stir uneasily. I felt the first signs of what was to become a growing sense of alienation from my everyday world. For the first time in my life, I had a choice between two distinct realities. One was crazy and one was sane—but I didn't know which was which, so I committed myself to neither. (P.268)
Get down off that fence, Dan. Pick a side: the everyday world, or Socrates' world. It's fitting that these two versions of reality are neatly divided by night and day. The everyday world when the sun is up, Socrates' world when the sun goes down. Eventually, of course, Dan begins to merge the two, and it's Socrates time all the time.