On giving to our children, page 366:

All this candor and self-confidence were a gift to her from her father and brother. The fairest gifts – and the most baneful – are those of which the donor is unconscious; they are conveyed over the years in the innumerable occasions of the daily life – in glance, pause, jest, silence, smile, expressions of admiration or disapproval.

Looking at the graveyard of the Convenant Church in Herkomer’s Knob, page 387:

There were no tombstones or markers of any kind. Roger did not voice his question.
‘The dead are given new names in Heaven, Mr Ashley. Here our names and bodies soon decay and are forgotten. My name is Samuel O’Hara; there are at least ten Samuel O’Haras in this field.’ His voice took on a dryness of tone. ‘Why should I wish an advertisement of myself here when I stand before God’s face?’

“The Eighth Day” is a book that can stand to have its last paragraph quoted without spoiling the reading for anyone. It’s on page 396:

History is one tapestry. No eye can venture to compass more than a hand’s breadth. . . . […]
There is much talk of design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some. . . .

That last paragraph was a bit of a let-down for me. I had invested in the characters; Wilder treats them with such respect and gentle redemption that I found it jarring for the book to end like that. “Well, that’s the story, but I’m not sure there’s a point to it.” I think having a new family made me connect more deeply with all the observations on family and the sweeping perspective covering several years and tracing different family members; I know for sure that when I slipped under the covers next to Janet (fifteen minutes before Joseph was to wake hungry) I felt that if I wasn’t the luckiest man alive, I certainly must be among the first runners-up. I also realized I better live like I believed that, and one first step might be going to bed at the same time as Janet. And if that’s what a book does to me, it deserves a recommendation, even if it kept me up past bedtime.

On servants in a St. Kitts household, page 283:

These servants were supposedly paid three shillings a month, but they had little need of money. Their meals, clothing, medical care, whippings, and amusement were supplied by their masters.

On boredom, page 283:

Boredom […] should not be mistaken for lethargy. Boredom is energy frustrated of outlet. She had been a woman of forceful character; little of it was left except her towering rages.

On patriarchy, page 297:

We may assume that when a patriarchal order is at its height – or a matriarchal order, also – it has a certain grandeur. It contributes to the even running of society and to harmony in the home. Everyone knows his place. The head of the family is always right. Fatherhood invests him with a more than personal wisdom. […] It is when the patriarchal order is undergoing transition – the pendulum swings in eternal oscillation between the male and female poles – that havoc descends upon the state and on the family. Fathers feel the pavement cracking beneath them. For a time they shout, argue, boast, and pour scorn upon the wife of their bosom and the pledges of their love. Abraham did not raise his voice.

(It seems to me, too, that during these transitions all parties want to hold on to their rights longer than their responsibilities, and impose them with show and posturing rather than on grounds of merit.)
Eustacia Lansing thinks about her life, page 303:

‘We are our lives. Everything is bound together. No smallest action can be thought other than it is.’ She groped among the concepts of necessity and free will. Everything is mysterious, but how unendurable life would be without the mystery.

And again from Eustacia Lansing, page 308:

Slowly she had learned that beautiful things are not for our possession but for our contemplation.

Eustacia talks about education with her son George, page 317:

‘I want you to have an education, George.’
‘I’m better educated than the fellows in those schools. I know algebra and chemistry and history. I just don’t like examinations.

Roughly 50 more pages to go. Let’s see if the pictures haven’t uploaded already.

He was the only child of doting parents in upper New York State. Idolized sons are not noted for gratitude or obedience.

On snobbery, page 269:

Snobbery is a passion. It is a noble passion that has gone astray amid appearances. It springs from a desire to escape the trivial and to be included among those who have no petty cares, no tedious moments, among those whose very misfortunes are lofty.

On Beata Ashley’s father, pages 270-271:

In Hoboken he was long the president of the best (of four) Sängervereine until he could no longer endure the banality of its programs. He grew tired of hearing forty obese men proclaim the joys of a hunter’s life and bid passing birds report their breaking hearts to their beloved.

On her mother, page 271:

She did not permit any discussion of the relative wealth or poverty of their friends. If her husband had entered the house one day and told her that he was bankrupt, she would have uttered no word of complaint. She would have moved to a slum and improved the tone of the neighborhood.

On family life, page 272:

Family life is like a hall endowed with the finest acoustical properties. Growing children hear not only their parents’ words (and in most cases gradually ignore them), they hear the intentions, the attitdes behind the words. Above all they learn what their parents really admire, really despise.

On John Ashley’s kind of independence, page 275:

John Ashley wanted all things new. He must be the first man who has earned his bread, to take a wife, to beget a child. Everything is filled with wonder – a bride, a first salary cheque, the infant in one’s arms. To announce these things to persons who think they are everyday occurrences is to endanger one’s own sense of their radiance.

On a writer, “Atticus,” who “had left America for the shores of the Thames and the Seine” and “from that safe distance, having taken out British citizenship, […] reviewed the horrors and absurdities of his native land:”

He attacked the Ashley with surprising virulence. […] Atticus stressed their propensity to commit social errors. It seems to have particularly annoyed him that they remained unabashed by these inelegant faux pas. It is true: certain discriminations were missing in the Ashleys. They were unable to distinguish shades of rank, wealth, birth, color, or servitude. In addition, Atticus felt that they were lacking in self-respect. They were slow to anger. They were serene under snub and insult. He was unable to deny their intelligence, but characterized it as lacking ‘suppleness’ and charm. He reserved his most biting deprecation for the end of his chapter. The last paragraph developed the idea that the Ashleys were – indubitably (he hated to say it, but the truth must come out; they were indubitably) Americans.

Typing it up, I wonder why I appreciate that last paragraph but don’t appreciate Mallard Fillmore, who uses much of the same technique.

One evening a reporter gave him a ticket to the opera. He attended a performance of Fidelio. It was an overwhelming experience. […] A man can produce fortitude from his own vitals, but the true food of valor is example. […] If operas were like that – if they concerned themselves with things that really mattered (rendered all but unendurably convincing by such wonderful noise) – he must so arrange his life as to be constantly present at them.

On writing letters in the Ashley household, page 213:

Both [Roger and his mother] had written many drafts for these Christmas letters; the emotion had been consigned to the wastepaper baskets.

From T.G. Speidel, nihilist, dean of the journalists, pages 218-219:

The most sacred thing in the world is property. It’s more sacred than conscience. It’s more untouchable than a woman’s reputation. And for all its importance, no one, NO ONE, has ever attempted to put a qualifying value on it. Property can be unearned, unmerited, extorted, abused, misspent, without losing one iota of its sacred character – its religious character.

He continues on about “the lie about property” and uses the word sockdologer. T.G.’s monologues are great examples of how someone gets it all wrong but gets enough chunks right to sound, if not convincing, then at least intriguing. On pages 220-221 he goes on about fathers:

Listen to me: all fathers hate their sons. They hate them – first! – because they know that their sons will be going around whistling in the sunlight when they’re rotting under the ground. […] Second! They’re terrified that the boys may make less of a mess of their lives than they’ve made. It’s a terrible thought that that man whom you knew as a little smeller in the cradle, as an idiotic puppy, as a troublemaking pimply adolescent – him! – that he could make a better showing in life than you’ve done. Terrible! […] No father since the beginning of time has ever given a word of advice or encouragement that would lead to his son’s thinking big and planning big. No, sir-eee! Dad sweats and wrings his hands and advises caution and going slow and keeping to the middle of the road. That passes under the name of paternal affection.

I’ll try to prove him wrong – though I am one to advise caution…
The Maestro on art, pages 243-245, one I include particularly because of Wilder’s fine ear for how men can paradoxically declaim self-conscious self-contradictions with utter sincerity:

Mr Frazier, works of art are the only satisfactory products of civilization. History, in itself, has nothing to show. History is the record of man’s repeated failures to extricate himself from his incorrigible nature. Those who see progress in it are as deluded as those who see a gradual degeneration. […] I don’t believe in God. I believe that those celebrated men and women – Mary of Nazareth and her family – are now each a pinch of dust, like all the billions of men and women who have died. But the representations of such beings are man’s greatest achievement. […] Who can count the prayers that have ascended to gods who do not exist? Mankind has himself created sources of help where there is no help and sources of consolation where there is no consolation. Yet such works as these are the only satisfying products of culture.

Finally, we return to the opera on page 251, Lily Ashley speaking:

One day I told the Maestro that I thought that most of the heroines in opera were silly geese. He said “Yes, of course. Opera is about greedy possessive passion. The girls make one mistake after another. They’re little whirlpools of destruction. First they bring death down on the baritones and basses – their fathers, guardians, or brothers; then they bring it down on the tenors. Then at half past eleven they go mad, or stab themselves, or jump into a fire, or get strangled. Or they just expire. Self-centered possessive love. The women in the audience cry a little, but on the way home they’re already planning tomorrow’s dinner!”

There are 140 pages more to go.

A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope, it pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure. It recommends moderation. This wider reference and longer view are not the gifts of any extraordinary wisdom; they are merely the condensed opinion of a given community at a given moment.

Roger Ashley’s reaction to the crowds in Chicago, page 196:

Chicago’s like a big clockshop – all those little hammers going. In the street people put on a face so that strangers won’t read their souls. A crowd is a sterner judge than a relative or friend. The crowd is God. LaSalle Street is like hell – you’re being judged all the time….Suicide very logical.

Talking to someone who believes in reincarnation, page 202:

‘You don’t really believe that, do you, Peter?’
Peter, upside down, rested his pale watery eyes on Roger and waited. ‘Never ask a man what he believes. Watch what he uses. “Believe” is a dead word and brings death with it.’

Roger’s thoughts on college education, page 205:

He had no wish to go to any of those colleges, or – for a time, at least – to read any of those famous books. He had walked the streets of Chicago at all hours. He had listened to scores of life stories. Man is cruel to man and even those who are kind to those nearest them are inhuman to others. It’s not kindness that’s important but justice. Kindness is the stammering apology of the unjust. The whole world’s wrong, he saw. There’s something wrong at the heart of the world and he would track it down. Many of those books and colleges had been around for hundreds of years – with very little effect.

His impression of medicine, page 207:

To his eyes medicine appeared to be a business of patch and shore and bolster – the temporary repair of unsalvageable vessels. He was an ignorant country boy; he had no idea that medicine could take a different view of itself.

Still page 207, the description of where the journalists lived in a hotel:

This corridor had long since lost its institutional uniformity. Most of the doors had been shattered in rage or horseplay and removed. The management had prudently replaced the chairs with benches and packing cases. For men without women a cave is sufficient.

And on the journalists themselves, pages 207 and 208:

They were rich in all the knowledge they were not permitted to print. Knowledge, like courage and virtue, isolates a man; they were thrown back on one another’s company. Barred from publishing what they knew, they were driven to seek out some other mode of expression: they were conversationalists. […] They were untalented reporters because their ambitions lay elsewhere […]. They were quick-witted; they had a wide if heterogeneous field of information. Above all they had a point of view: the abject condition of man and the futility of his efforts to improve himself. Any confrontation with fortitude, heroism, piety, or even dignity rendered them uncomfortable. They prided themselves on being impressed by nothing. Any impulse toward admiration or compassion they promptly converted into ribaldry and persiflage.