A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.
And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.
Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC
How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.
You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.
The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.
To be is to do – SocratesTo do is to be – SartreDo Be Do Be Do – Sinatra
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .” “And?” “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.
Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.
Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Perhaps some people really are born unhappy. I surely hope not. Speaking for my sister and myself: We were born with the capacity and determination to be utterly happy all the time. Perhaps even in this we were freaks. Hi ho.
I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. “Oh, well — he wasn’t going to write the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.
I wanted all thingsTo seem to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit nice,And I made this sad worldA par-a-dise.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:ETC.
Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.
Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”[From the preface.]
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.
Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, “You think your dad’s a good chemist? They’re turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is.
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.
Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.
I concluded that the best thing for me and for those around me was to want nothing, to be enthusiastic about nothing, to be as unmotivated as possible, in fact, so that I would never again hurt anyone.
Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics- job politics, social politics, government politics
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That’s what it is to be human, I’m afraid.
Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don’t read much or think much — who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?
That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.
The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.
It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting—other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards.
He didn’t know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.
And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.
The name of the new religion,” said Rumfoord, “is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington D.C.
There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. “Beautiful,” he whispered.
Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.
Their beauty was to the beauty of Miss Canal Zone as the glory of the Sun was to the glory of a lightning bug.
The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.
That’s what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality”, or maybe even “pain”.
…a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.
what you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations
The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.
We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten…. Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re 10. … Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.’Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
You’re the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don’t want my square of toilet p
She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
If people think nature is their friend then they sure don’t need an enemy.
Your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of you.
There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.
The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.
Jesus of Nazareth told us to say these twelve words when we prayed: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ … And for those words alone, he deserves to be called ;the Prince of Peace.
What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.
You can’t help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.
In an extended family, anybody can bug out of his own house for months, and still be among relatives. Nobody has to go on a hopeless quest for friendly strangers, which is what most Americans have to do.
The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy’s mustache.
profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.
You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.
This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.
When I write, I feel like an armless leg less man with a crayon in his mouth.
The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
This has been my greatest challenge: because the current reality now seems so unreal, it’s hard to make nonfiction seem believable. But you, my friend [Michael Moore], are able to do that.
What is my definition of jazz? ‘Safe sex of the highest order.
Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.
Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.
I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic.
I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves “Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment
Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it–love yourself
Don’t forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.
Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.
Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.
He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was–if you couldn’t run a machine. A duel was under way.
How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders waht is really going on.We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans.
A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.
This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.
I hear he liked flowers pretty well.””Yes,” said Annie, “he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him.”–“Out, Brief Candle
As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: ‘Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.
Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.
Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.
I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.
You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
The statue was of a nude woman playing a slide trombone. It was entitles, enigmatically, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin.
There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.
It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.
The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves–that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune’s cruelest agents as well.
There were lots of things to stop and see – and then it was time to go, always time to go.
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore.
The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.
Is this some kind of joke?””That’s for me to know and you to find out.””Maybe you think it’s funny to put up signs about people who want to commit sui
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? Only verse: Nothing.
Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: “Just say no.
We’re really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’ – she’s talking about cannibals. Lot’s to eat.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed
A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap.
Nothing ever really ends. That’s the horrible part of being in the short-story business—you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. ‘Millicent at last understands.’ Nobody ever understands.
I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.
She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.
She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be, Billy said he didn’t know.
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science fiction” … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” the long out-of-print science fiction writer went on.
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.
Maybe I did hurt him, but I don’t think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in people.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.
We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.
Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.
Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say ‘Shut up, I just got here myself’.
Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”“You don’t seem to agree.”“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.
You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.
My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.
To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.
The human race is a scummy thing, and so is Earth, and so are you.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. ‘We have a right to know what’s going on!’ she cried.
Please look at the imperfect human being God gave to love you once, and try to like me a little for what I really was, or, God willing, am. Then please, darling, become an imperfect human being among imperfect human beings again.””Jenny
Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with
That’s what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)
When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moment, past, present, future, always have existed, always will exist.
The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton,” is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.
In case nobody has told you,” she said, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else–where everybody learns to make his or her own way.
We didn’t belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangeable parts in the American machine.
Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.
The church, which squatted among the headstones like a wet mother dodo, had been at various times Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Unitarian, and Universally Apocalyptic. It was now the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.
She said his music was tuned to the biggest music there ever was, the music of the stars.
Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said.”So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors!
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done
Painters–and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.
And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.
And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.
I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.
And Castle nodded sagely. ‘So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree
Theology: (15) Somebody made everything for some reason.
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from the things she found in gift shops.
Jesus–if Kilgore Trout could only write!” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
I have no doubt that they’ll tell you a lot of kind things about me when my back is turned. They may not have been behind the door when God passed out the pretty faces, but Heaven only knows where they were when He divided up the gratitude.
He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.
One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
What is the secret of life?’ I asked.‘I forget,’ said Sandra.‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found something out about protein.‘‘Yeah,’ said Sandra, ‘that’s it.
Q: What is wrong with the world?A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.
The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.
When things are going really well, we should take time to notice it.
There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.
Tis better to have love and lustThan to let our apparatus rust.
How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Fear hadn’t come to him yet. Pain hadn’t come where pain would come. There was only the feeling of having done something perfect at last—the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring.
Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.
He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity.
Maturity,” Bokonontells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unlesslaughter can be said to remedy anything.
Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.
There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.–“Bomar
You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.
If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people’s vanity and foolishness.
The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.As the tag line of my favorite dirty joke would have it: “Keep your hat on. We could wind up miles from here.
Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.
Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached a crescendo outside. “I fry mine in butter!” indeed.
My God, what have they done to you? This isn’t a man, it’s a broken kite.
And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?
The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.
As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.
May I ask you a highly personal question?””It’s what life does all the time.
Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
As I spoke of another’s love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses.–“Tango
It couldn’t have been gonorrhea, which never stops eating you up of its own accord. Why should it ever stop of its own accord? It’s having such a nice time. Why call off the party? Look how healthy and happy the kids are.
He hadn’t killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn’t had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government.
I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.
It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.
They made a science out of people?” she said. “What a crazy science that must be.”–“Mr. Z
The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.