Quotes

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.

Alcohol

The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

Alcohol

The greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.

Life

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

Wealth

I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Politics

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

People

I do realize that I am a very slow realizer.

People

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—: " ’God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Life

My books so far have argued that most human behavior, no matter how ghastly or ludicrous or glorious or whatever, is innocent.

People

The German quotation means this, and I take it seriously: “Whatever it is that you have inherited from your father, you are going to have to earn it if it is to really belong to you.”

Wealth

Those of you who have been kind enough to read a book of mine, any book of mine, will know of my admiration for large families, whether real or artificial, as the primary supporters of mental health.

People

But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate my subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Writing

Here is the same rule paraphrased to apply to storytelling, to fiction: Never include a sentence which does not either remark on character or advance the action.

Writing

“Who in America is truly happy?” my offspring used to ask me in one way or another as they entered adolescence, which is children’s menopause.

Life

We were just getting our footing as adult citizens, and in other times we might have been correct in thinking that we had better like and trust each other a lot, since we would be together for life.

Life

I have heard other people say that they, too, remain irrationally fond of those who were with them when they were just starting out. It’s a common thing.

Life

“How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. “The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.

Writing

Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

Writing

They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.

Religion

Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

Life

In 1928, the stock market never seemed to do anything but go up and up, just like the one we have today! Whoopee!

Wealth

The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

Education

What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn’t take such things too seriously.

Life

“Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’”

America

“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

Life

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

Life

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

Life

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Life

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. “There is evil for you. “We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. “I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

War

We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Life

It may be a bad thing that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives. A story, after all, is as artificial as a mechanical bucking bronco in a drinking establishment.

Life

He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

Life

I do not propose to discuss my love life. I will say that I still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

Romance

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855–1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party’s candidate for President, in every speech: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Politics

And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution: Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.

America

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything. They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Writing

“You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”

Life

I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

Life

Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”

Life

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

Life

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

Romance

We didn't belong anywhere in particular any more. We were interchangable parts in the American machine.

America

It is a thing I often say these days: "Hi ho." It is a kind of senile hiccup. I have lived too long. Hi ho.

Other

They were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that human beings were ever meant to be.

People

Life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.

Life

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

People

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Romance

"Life is divided up into phases," he said. "Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living."

Life

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

Life

Science is magic that works.

Science

Busy, busy, busy.

Other

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.

People

To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

Other

We are all healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

People

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

People

Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.

Religion

So it goes.

Life

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Other

My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, “What’s your name?” And I say, My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin…” And so on to infinity.

Other

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

Alcohol

It described the creatures from Tralfamadore. The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm.

Other

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Life

Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction. This can be useful in rocketry.

Science

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

Time

“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

Life

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—“with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

Time

What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

Writing

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed 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.

Life

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.

Writing

“How—how does the Universe end?” said Billy. “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” So it goes. “He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.”

Life

The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England.

Other

The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace.

America

“Schlachthof-fünf.”

Other

It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it goes.

Entertainment

The news of the day, meanwhile, was being written in a ribbon of lights on a building to Billy’s back. The window reflected the news. It was about power and sports and anger and death. So it goes.

Entertainment

A sign in there said that adults only were allowed in the back. There were peep shows in the back that showed movies of young women and men with no clothes on. It cost a quarter to look into a machine for one minute. There were still photographs of naked young people for sale back there, too. You could take those home. The stills were a lot more Tralfamadorian than the movies, since you could look at them whenever you wanted to, and they wouldn’t change. Twenty years in the future, those girls would still be young, would still be smiling or smoldering or simply looking stupid, with their legs wide open. Some of them were eating lollipops or bananas. They would still be eating those. And the peckers of the young men would still be semierect, and their muscles would be bulging like cannonballs.

Life

The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then he realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans’ hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

Other

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth. The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo—to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms. The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl. It worked. Olive oil went up.

Wealth

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”

Other

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.”

Life

“Life’s a bad dream,” he said. “Do you know that?”

Life

The truth can be very funny in an awful way, especially as it relates to greed and hypocrisy.

People

Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in automobiles would do to each other and what’s left of the atmosphere?

Environment

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

People

The worst flaw is that we’re just plain dumb.

People

That much of his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday’s interest on the National Debt.

Politics

I still find it hard to realize that I am an alcoholic, though even strangers know this right away.

Alcohol

"I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can’t even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they’re almost completely automatic now. And America doesn’t even need these people for war—not any more.

Automation

I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarrassing and the future so terrifying.

Life

Those were our salad days, when we were green in judgment.

Life

“I have not said that our government is anti-nature and anti-God. I have said that it is non-nature and non-God, for very good reasons that could curl your hair. “Well—all good things must come to an end, they say. So American freedom will come to an end, too, sooner or later. How will it end? As all freedoms end: by the surrender of our destinies to the highest laws.

America

He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on.

America

They began to live on their capital which, to a good bourgeois, is a heresy looked upon with horror and usually followed by disaster.

Wealth

I had a friend who was a heavy drinker. If somebody asked him if he’d been drunk the night before, he would always answer off-handedly, “Oh, I imagine.” I’ve always liked that answer. It acknowledges life as a dream.

Life

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.

Writing

Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.

Writing

Psychoanalysts are missing important clues about patients’ childhoods if they do not ask about dogs the patients knew. As I have said elsewhere, dogs still seem as respectable and interesting as people to me. Any day.

Life

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads—or in other people’s heads. “And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. “By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

Writing

“As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher who died seventy-eight years ago, had this to say: ‘Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.’ We are supposed to be bored. It is a part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.

Life

It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall, as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected Germany, a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation, with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.

Life

“existential hum,” the uneasiness which keeps us moving, which never allows us to feel entirely at ease.

Life

“How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? For one thing, I guess, the balderdash is usually beautiful—and therefore echoes excitingly in the more primitive lobes of our brains, where knowledge counts for nothing.

Religion

“Truth,” he says, “must always be recognized as the paramount requisite of human society.”

People

A child will compete with its father in an area where the father is weak, in an area where the father mistakenly believes himself to be quite accomplished.

Life

What isn’t congenial is an admission that I have been forced to be celibate for long periods of time. I search the index of The Joy of Sex in vain for “celibacy,” which happens to be the most common human sexual adventure, and which could be illustrated nicely by a page as white as a snowdrift.

Romance

How many women eager to fuck me do you suppose I encountered in three long years? I could ask the same question about months and months in my civilian life, and get the same answer: to all practical purposes, none.

Romance

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”

Life

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

Writing

“I never prayed before, but I’ll pray tonight that you never go to Europe as a soldier. We should never get suckered again into providing meat for the cannons and machine guns they love so much. They could go to war at any time. Look how big their armies are in the midst of a Great Depression! “If the cities are still standing when you get to Europe,” he said, “and you sit in a cafe for hours, sipping coffee or wine or beer, and discussing painting and music and literature, just remember that the Europeans around you, who you think are so much more civilized than Americans, are looking forward to just one thing: the time when it will become legal to kill each other and knock everything down again.

War

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.” Can you imagine that?

War

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else to start anew.

America

Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States.

America

What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!

Life

What is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’”

Writing

“The whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always men against women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves.”

War

She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

Life

kar•a•bek•i•an (,kar-a-‘bek-ē-an), n. (from Rabo Karabekian, U.S. 20th cent, painter). Fiasco in which a person causes total destruction of own work and reputation through stupidity, carelessness or both.

Maybe

"The Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”

War

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me. There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone. Haiti is New York City, where I live now. The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.

Other

“To be is to do”—Socrates. “To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre. “Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra.

Life

It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse.

Life

“He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. “Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’”

Life

Trout said Booboolings were among the most adaptable creatures in the local family of galaxies. This was thanks to their great big brains, which could be programmed to do or not do, and feel or not feel, just about anything. You name it! The programming wasn’t done surgically or electrically, or by any other sort of neurological intrusiveness. It was done socially, with nothing but talk, talk, talk. Grownups would speak to little Booboolings favorably about presumably appropriate and desirable feelings and deeds. The brains of the youngsters would respond by growing circuits that made civilized pleasures and behavior automatic. It seemed a good idea, for example, when nothing much was really going on, for Booboolings to be beneficially excited by minimal stimuli, such as idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and eight or so punctuation marks, or dabs of pigment on flat surfaces in frames.

People

Boobooling pedagogy

Other

Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.

People

She could at least try to make existence for His little toys less painful. She could see what He couldn’t: To be alive was to be either bored or scared stiff. So she filled an apple with all sorts of ideas that might at least relieve the boredom, such as rules for games with cards and dice, and how to fuck, and recipes for beer and wine and whiskey, and pictures of different plants that were smokable, and so on. And instructions on how to make music and sing and dance real crazy, real sexy. And how to spout blasphemy when they stubbed their toes. “Satan had a serpent give Eve the apple. Eve took a bite and handed it to Adam. He took a bite, and then they fucked.”

Religion

“Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.”

Romance

I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Böll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, “Obedience.”

People

“The timequake of 2001 was a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny.

Other

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Life

Hitler still hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He says, “How about ‘BINGO’?”

Other

We would prefer to live our lives as Humanists and not talk about it, or think more about it than we think about breathing.

Religion

Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

Religion

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism.

Religion

Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t.

Religion

say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person.

Romance

And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered, with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog’s breakfast, from his three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge.

Science

My father often misquoted Shakespeare, but I never saw him read a book.

Writing

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

Writing

Again: Somebody should look into this.

Life

“You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn’t be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.

Life

“Of native talent itself I say in speeches: ‘If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.’”

Life

To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

Life

At the time of their invention, books were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, albeit fabricated from scarcely modified substances found in forest and field and animals, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Writing

I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation, but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.

Science

He or she or it cannot exist, thanks to the brain and the ding-dong, et cetera. So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety. For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.

Wealth

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Wealth

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.

Life

I told Borden what Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said.

Life

Xanthippe thought her husband, Socrates, was a fool. Aunt Raye thought Uncle Alex was a fool. Mother thought Father was a fool. My wife thinks I’m a fool. I’m wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I.

Romance

They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing. There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another. Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown. The creatures have only one sense: touch. They have weak powers of telepathy. The messages they are capable of transmitting and receiving are almost as monotonous as the song of Mercury. They have only two possible messages. The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first. The first is, “Here I am, here I am, here I am.” The second is, “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

Life

I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm.

Life

I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL.

Life

“It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

Life

“Don’t ask me why, old sport,” said Stony, “but somebody up there likes you.”

Life

It is about what life feels like to me.

Life

I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love. It does not seem important to me. What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.

Life

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, annyway, although the ones I have like best couldd easily be described as "common decency."

Romance

It is lucky, too for human beings need all the relatives they can get--as possible donors or recievers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

Life

They were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight--obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again.

Wealth

I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too. We argued that it was a good scheme for a misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves--and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.

America

Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had discovered anything. "All of a sudden," she said, "everything is being discovered by the Chinese."

America

The People's Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses--by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newton's or William Sharespeare's, say.

America

Lonesome no more!

Other

--Das Ende--

Other

When you're dead you're dead.

Life

A poem by William Blake called "The Question Answered": What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

Life

My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.

People

Does alcohol help? "I think it only seems to--and only seems to for about half an hour," I said. This, too was an opinion from my youth.

Alcohol

Why don't you learn dat old Golden Rule?

Life

This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people.

America

And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.

People

Nothing in this book is true. "Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

Life

Be like a baby, the bible say, so I stay like a baby to this very day.

Life

Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

Religion

See the cat? See the cradle?

Other

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.

People

I agree with one Bokononist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.

Religion

God made mud.

Religion

Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks, For he knows a man's as big as what he hopes and thinks!

People

1492: The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

America

They used human beings for machinery, and even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machinery.

Wealth

Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

People

GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.

Other

People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.

People

The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy by and large.

Environment

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

America

There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.

Environment

This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick.

America

"This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be. The characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or perhaps, at this writing, infants. It is mostly about managers and engineers. At this point in history, 1952 A.D., out lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.

Automation

The first industrial revolution devalued muscle work, then the second industrial revolution devalued mental work.

Automation

That, of course, simply applies to the First Industrial Revolution, where machines devalued muscle work. The second revolution, the one we're now completing, is a little tougher to express in terms of work saved. If there were some measure like horsepower in which we could express annoyance or boredom that people used to experience in routine jobs -- but there isn't.

Automation

Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against machines. It's a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top.

Automation

“Poo-tee-weet?”

Other

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. *** I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

War

No art is possible without a dance with death,

Art

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that 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 moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

Life

All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.

Life

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

America

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on.

Life

“That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

Life

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Wealth

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

America

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

Other

Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.

Life

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Wealth

Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.

War

“Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.”

Life

The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin—who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

Life

On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. In addition 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. “I suppose they will all want dignity,” I said. “I suppose,” said O’Hare.

Life

appoggiatura

Other

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.

Life

The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.

Education

He was a sociopath, I think, in love with himself and no one else, craving action for its own sake, and indifferent to any long-term consequences, a classic Man of Destiny.

People

The computer doesn’t ask if the person is real or not. It doesn’t care about anything. It especially doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings. You load it up with details about a life, real or imagined, and then it spits out a story about what was likely to happen to him or her. This story is based on what has happened to real persons with the same general specifications.

Technology

I argued that it was a teacher’s duty to speak frankly to students of college age about all sorts of concerns of humankind, not just the subject of a course as stated in the catalogue. “That’s how we gain their trust, and encourage them to speak up as well,” I said, “and realize that all subjects do not reside in neat little compartments, but are continuous and inseparable from the one big subject we have been put on Earth to study, which is life itself.”

Education

In Vietnam, though, I really was the mastermind. Yes, and that still bothers me. During my last year there, when my ammunition was language instead of bullets, I invented justifications for all the killing and dying we were doing which impressed even me! I was a genius of lethal hocus pocus!

War

“They looted your public and corporate treasuries, and turned your industries over to nincompoops,” he said. “Then they had your Government borrow so heavily from us that we had no choice but to send over an Army of Occupation in business suits. Never before has the Ruling Class of a country found a way to stick other countries with all the responsibilities their wealth might imply, and still remain rich beyond the dreams of avarice! No wonder they thought the comatose Ronald Reagan was a great President!”

Wealth

He recalled what his favorite professor, Leonard Leech, once told him about getting ahead in law. Leech said that, just as a good airplane pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands.

Wealth

But there is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I roam. And I roam.

Life

"Old men without hope have a tendency to be both crude and accurate.

People

Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word."

People

You mean shame about not knowing where the Money River is?" "The what?" "The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it—and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed and played tennis with. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently." "Slurping lessons?" "From lawyers! From tax consultants! From customers’ men! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping." "I wasn’t aware that I slurped." Eliot was fleetingly heartless, for he was thinking angrily in the abstract. "Born slurpers never are. And they can’t imagine what the poor people are talking about when they say they hear somebody slurping. They don’t even know what it means when somebody mentions the Money River. When one of us claims that there is no such thing as the Money River I think to myself, ’My gosh, but that’s a dishonest and tasteless thing to say.’ "

Wealth

"It’s still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own." "Sure—provided somebody tells him when he’s young enough that there is a Money River, that there’s nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. ’Go where the rich and the powerful are,’ I’d tell him, ’and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.’ "

Wealth

The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time—to start thinking in terms of projects.

People

"what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?

Automation

"In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. So—if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out."

Automation

“I then believed that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from which his riches came. That was very juvenile of me. Great wealth should be accepted unquestioningly, or not at all.”

Wealth

Pay attention, please, for years as well as people are characters in this book, which is the story of my life so far. Nineteen-hundred and Twenty-nine wrecked the American economy. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one sent me to Harvard. Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight got me my first job in the federal government. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me a wife. Nineteen-hundred and Forty-six gave me an ungrateful son. Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-three fired me from the federal government.

Other

YOUNG PEOPLE STILL REFUSE TO SEE THE OBVIOUS IMPOSSIBILITY OF WORLD DISARMAMENT AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY. COULD BE FAULT OF NEW TESTAMENT (QUOD VIDE). WALTER F. STARBUCK PRESIDENT’S SPECIAL ADVISOR ON YOUTH AFFAIRS

People

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

Religion

Jesus, according to Saint Matthew, had promised to say in the Person of God to sinners on Judgment Day. This is it: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” These words appalled me then, and they appall me now. They are surely the inspiration for the notorious cruelty of Christians.

Religion

So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, ‘Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.’”

Life

I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of “Kilgore Trout.” It was called “Asleep at the Switch.” It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven—filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth. You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth. All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: “And there you were, asleep at the switch again.”

Religion

“Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

Religion

They are actually proud of their illiteracy. They imagine that they are somehow celebrating the bicentennial when they boast, as some did in Levittown, that they hadn’t actually read the books they banned. Such lunks are often the backbone of volunteer fire departments and the United States Infantry and cake sales and so on, and they have been thanked often enough for that. But they have no business supervising the educations of children in a free society. They are just too bloody stupid.

Education

Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans.

America

“What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

America

We Americans were told by the Soviets that we should be embarrassed that their country published so much of our work, and that we published so little of theirs.

America

He was also then a socialist, and among the books he gave me, when I was a high school sophomore, was Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. I understood it perfectly and loved it, since it made low comedy of the empty graces and aggressively useless possessions which my parents, and especially my mother, meant to regain someday.

Wealth

I myself grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

America

Did the study of anthropology later color your writings? VONNEGUT: It confirmed my atheism, which was the faith of my fathers anyway. Religions were exhibited and studied as the Rube Goldberg inventions I’d always thought they were. We weren’t allowed to find one culture superior to any other. We caught hell if we mentioned races much. It was highly idealistic. INTERVIEWER: Almost a religion? VONNEGUT: Exactly. And the only one for me. So far. INTERVIEWER: What was your dissertation? VONNEGUT: Cat’s Cradle.

Religion

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. I admire anybody who finishes a work of art, no matter how awful it may be.

Art

A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces. “So I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

Life

The trouble with so many of the moral codes we have inherited is that they are subject to so many interpretations. We require specialists, historians and archaeologists and linguists and so on, to tell us where this or that idea may have come from, to suggest what this or that statement might actually mean. This is good news for hypocrites, who enjoy feeling pious, no matter what they do.

Life

“We would have to understand from the first the scientific fact that any wound we inflict on the life-support systems of this planet is likely to be quite permanent. So anyone who wounded the planet, and then pretended to heal it, would simply be another hypocrite. He would remain quite permanently an evil and therefore disgusting human being.

Environment

“More important, though: the acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. 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 goddamned lonely anymore.

Religion

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained. I write.

Life

The mortality rate in some wards was sensational—25 percent or more. Semmelweis reasoned that the mothers were being killed by medical students, who often came into the wards immediately after having dissected corpses riddled with disease. He was able to prove this by having the students wash their hands in soap and water before touching a woman in labor. The mortality rate dropped. The jealousy and ignorance of Semmelweis’s colleagues, however, caused him to be fired, and the mortality rate went up again. Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.

People

The rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment by male state legislators is this clear statement by men, in my opinion: “We’re sorry, girls, but your reproductive abilities are about all we can really like you for.” The truth.

Politics

I can only reply that the secret to success in every human endeavor is total concentration. To put it another way: Sometimes I don’t consider myself very good at life, so I hide in my profession.

Life

She replied that she wasn’t on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. “I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals,” she said. “Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.”

Life

Bluebeard is a fictitious character in a very old children’s tale, possibly based loosely on a murderous nobleman of long ago. In the story, he has married many times. He marries for the umpteenth time, and brings his latest child bride back to his castle. He tells her that she can go into any room but one, whose door he shows her.

Other

The widow Berman agrees that Marilee was using me, but not in the way my father thought. “You were her audience,” she said. “Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs.

Writing

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.

War

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

Life

“As the philosopher George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’” “Is that a fact?” she said. “Well—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. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten.”

People

Terry Kitchen said that the only moments he ever experienced as non-epiphanies, when God left him alone, were those following sex and the two times he took heroin.

Life

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to He and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

America

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. 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.

Life

As for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici, according to Kim Bum Suk: he was a banker, which I choose to translate as “loan shark and extortionist” or “gangster,” in the parlance of the present day.

Wealth

“Early one morning she crossed a meadow, carrying two precious eggs to a neighbor who had given birth to a baby the night before. She stepped on a mine. We don’t know what army was responsible. We do know the sex. Only a male would design and bury a device that ingenious. Before you leave, maybe you can persuade Lucrezia to show you all the medals she won.” Can I please return to my hotel?” “No,” she said. “I think I’ve reduced you to the level of self-esteem which men try to force on women. If I have, I would very much like to have you stay for the tea I promised you. Who knows? We might even become friends again.”

War

She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy. He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time.

Life

“Does the picture have a title?” she said, rejoining me at the middle. “Yes it does,” I said. “What is it?” she said. And I said: “‘Now It’s the Women’s Turn.’”

Other

I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud and with all my heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’” Oh, happy Meat. Oh, happy Soul. Oh, happy Rabo Karabekian.

Other

Eggs à la Rudy Waltz (age thirteen): Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach. Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg. Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups. Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees.

Other

And she wasn’t going to go seeking any kind of Holy Grail, since that was clearly a man’s job, and she already had a cup that overflowed and overflowed with good things to eat and drink anyway. I suppose that’s really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue. Mother’s story ended when she married the handsomest rich man in town.

Life

I had the timequake zap everybody and everything in an instant from February 13th, 2001, back to February 17th, 1991. Then we all had to get back to 2001 the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again. You name it!

Other

say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.

Art

The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.” That is in an essay on the sudden death of his daughter

Life

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”

Life

Hooray for firemen! Scum of the Earth as some may be in their daily lives, they can all be saints in emergencies. Hooray for firemen.

People

He said without a scintilla of regret, “I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades.”

War

“It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models. “People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”

People

Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O’Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor or whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days. No more.

Education

When a little Boobooling was reading a book, a grownup might interrupt to say, depending on what was happening in the book, “Isn’t that sad? The little girl’s nice little dog has just been run over by a garbage truck. Doesn’t that make you want to cry?” Or the grownup might say, about a very different sort of story, “Isn’t that funny? When that conceited old rich man stepped on a nim-nim peel and fell into an open manhole, didn’t that make you practically pop a gut laughing?” A nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo.

Education

When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture and market these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved.

People

Without imaginations, though, they couldn’t do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting, heartwarming stories in the faces of one another. So, according to Kilgore Trout, “Booboolings became among the most merciless creatures in the local family of galaxies.”

People

“All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases,” he concluded. “And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.”

Religion

The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.

Writing

Here’s the thing: Frank went to the drugstore for condoms or chewing gum or whatever, and the pharmacist told him that his sixteen-year-old daughter had become an architect and was thinking of dropping out of high school because it was such a waste of time. She had designed a recreation center for teenagers in depressed neighborhoods with the help of a new computer program the school had bought for its vocational students, dummies who weren’t going to anything but junior colleges. It was called Palladio. Frank went to a computer store, and asked if he could try out Palladio before buying it. He doubted very much that it could help anyone with his native talent and education. So right there in the store, and in a period of no more than half an hour, Palladio gave him what he had asked it for, working drawings that would enable a contractor to build a three-story parking garage in the manner of Thomas Jefferson. Frank had made up the craziest assignment he could think of, confident that Palladio would tell him to take his custom elsewhere. But it didn’t! It presented him with menu after menu, asking how many cars, and in what city, because of various local building codes, and whether trucks would be allowed to use it, too, and on and on. It even asked about surrounding buildings, and whether Jeffersonian architecture would be in harmony with them. It offered to give him alternative plans in the manner of Michael Graves or I. M. Pei. It gave him plans for the wiring and plumbing, and ballpark estimates of what it would cost to build in any part of the world he cared to name. So Frank went home and killed himself the first time.

Automation

In public lectures, I myself often say, “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

Life

He quoted Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

Life

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’”

Other

In my novel Cat’s Cradle, I say that anybody whose life keeps tangling up with yours for no logical reason is likely a member of your karass, a team God has formed to get something done for Him.

Other

I don’t have a copy of my letter as prose. As a poem, though, this is its appearance: And no thanks to Fate. When we’re gone, there won’t be anybody Sufficiently excited by ink on paper To realize how good it is. I have this ailment not unlike Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be called Ambulatory writer’s block. I cover paper with words every day, But the stories never go anywhere I find worth going. Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned Into an opera by a young German, And will have its premiere in Munich this June. I’m not going there either. Not interested. I am fond of Occam’s Razor, Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon Is usually the most trustworthy. And I now believe, with David’s help, That writer’s block is finding out How lives of loved ones really ended Instead of the way we hoped they would end With the help of our body English. Fiction is body English. Whatever.

Writing

Sodium said enough was enough, that any further testimony would be coals to Newcastle. It made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine whenever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them.

Other

In no time, Sodium predicted, every human ailment, including acne and jock itch, would be not only incurable but fatal. “All humans will die,” said Sodium, according to Trout. “As they were at the birth of the Universe, all elements will be free of sin again.”

Other

‘TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!’”

Other

Here’s the thing about Trout’s appearance from a distance: Instead of trousers, he wore three layers of thermal underwear, revealing the shapes of his calves below the hem of his unisex war-surplus Navy overcoat. Yes, and he wore sandals rather than boots, another seemingly feminine touch, as was his babushka, fashioned from a crib blanket printed with red balloons and blue teddy bears.

Other

“That the rerun lasted ten years, short a mere four days, some are saying now, is proof that there is a God, and that He is on the Decimal System. He has ten fingers and ten toes, just as we do, they say, and uses them when He does arithmetic.

Other

To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, “indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex.”

Writing

“Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper,” he went on. “Wonderful! As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!”

Environment

At this point in the story, Trout asked this rhetorical question, an aside with a paragraph all to itself: “What the heck?”

Writing

“How the hell did I do that?”

Other

I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity.

Other

Most other people, after the relentless reprise of their mistakes and bad luck and hollow victories during the past ten years, had, in Trout’s words, “stopped giving a shit what was going on, or what was liable to happen next.” This syndrome would eventually be given a name: Post-Timequake Apathy, or PTA.

Other

Trout now performed an experiment that many of us had tried to perform at the start of the rerun. He said nonsensical things on purpose, and out loud, like, “Boop-boop-a-doop, dingle-dangle, artsy-fartsy, wah, wah,” and so on. We all tried to say things on that order back in the second 1991, hoping to prove we could still say or do whatever we liked, if we tried hard enough.

Other

Yes, and all the people falling down in Timequake One, and now in this book, are like “FUCK ART!” spray-painted across the steel front door of the Academy. They are homage to my sister Allie. They are Allie’s kind of porno: people deprived of dignified postures by gravity instead of sex.

Art

This one naked ape invented differential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown laws governing motion and gravity and optics! Give us a break!

Science