To find order in chaos - why, of course; that was what he'd wanted all his life. He had been born for this, for finding order in chaos, and all the w… - Richard Yates

Wow, he said. Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that's all we ever talked about. We'd sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said 'hopeless', though; that's where we'd chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that's where there's nothing to do but take off. If you can.

Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.

I mean talk about decadence, he declared, how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world.