Metafictional works

"Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can't explain them, and those who haven't known them have no understanding of them at all. Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why. Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them. Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table. Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrifice every thing for a dream that can never come true. Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place. And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people."

"The Childlike Empress – as her title indicates – was looked upon as the ruler over all the innumerable provinces of the Fantastican Empire, but in reality she was far more than a ruler; she was something entirely different. She didn't rule, she had never used force or made use of her power. She never issued commands and she never judged anyone. She never interfered with anyone and never had to defend herself against any assailant; for no one would have thought of rebelling against her or of harming her in any way. In her eyes all her subjects were equal. She was simply there in a special way. She was the center of all life in Fantastica. And every creature, whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly, merry or solemn, foolish or wise – all owed their existence to her existence. Without her, nothing could have lived, any more than a human body can live if it has lost its heart. All knew this to be so, though no one fully understood her secret. Thus she was respected by all the creatures of the Empire, and her health was of equal concern to them all. For her death would have meant the end of them all, the end of the boundless Fantastican realm."

"Everyone in Fantastica knew what the medallion meant. It was the badge of one acting on orders from the Childlike Empress, acting in her name as though she herself were present. It was said to give the bearer mysterious powers, though no one knew exactly what these powers were. Everyone knew its name: AURYN. But many, who feared to pronounce the name, called it the "Gem" or the "Glory"."

"It's doubtful whether even the greatest, most experienced of heroes could carry out this mission ... and you! ... She's sending you into the unfathomable to look for the unknown. ... No one can help you, no one can advise you, no one can foresee what will befall you. And yet you must decide at once, immediately, whether or not you accept the mission. There's not a moment to be lost."

"AURYN gives you great power ... but you must not make use of it. For the Childlike Empress herself never makes use of her power. AURYN will protect you and guide you, but whatever comes your way you must never interfere, because from this moment on your own opinion ceases to count. For that same reason you must go unarmed. You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise, just as it is in the eyes of the Childlike Empress. You may only search and inquire, never judge. Always remember that, Atreyu!"

"Your life is short, son. Ours is long. Much too long. But we both live in time. You a short time. We a long time. The Childlike Empress has always been there. But she's not old. She has always been young. She still is. Her life isn't measured by time, but by names. She needs a new name. She keeps needing new names."

"What I've started I must finish. I've gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward."

"Luckdragons are among the strangest animals in Fantastica. They bear no resemblance to ordinary dragons, which look like loathsome snakes and live in deep caves, diffusing a noxious stench and guarding some real or imaginary treasure. Such spawn of chaos are usually wicked or ill-tempered, they have batlike wings with which they can rise clumsily and noisily into the air, and they spew fire and smoke. Luckdragons are creatures of air, warmth, and pure joy. Despite their great size, they are as light as a summer cloud, and consequently need no wings for flying. They swim in the air of heaven as fish swim in water. Seen from the earth, they look like slow lightning flashes. The most amazing thing about them is their song. Their voice sounds like the golden note of a large bell, and when they speak softly the bell seems to be ringing in the distance. Anyone who has heard this sound will remember it as long as he lives and tell his grandchildren about it."

"The sphinxes shut their eyes for some travelers and let them through. The question that no one has answered up until now is this: Why one traveler and not another? Because you mustn't suppose they let wise, brave, or good people through, and keep the stupid, cowardly, and wicked out. Not a bit of it! With my own eyes I've seen them admit stupid fools and treacherous knaves, while decent, sensible people have given up after being kept waiting for months. And it seems to make no difference whether a person has some serious reason for consulting the Oracle, or whether he's just come for the fun of it."

"If no one has told you who or what Uyulala is, there must be a reason. And before I know what that reason is, I can't decide whether someone who hasn't seen her with his own eyes has a right to know."

"Oh, nothing can happen more than once, But all things must happen one day Over hill and dale, over wood and stream, My dying voice will blow away..."

""Have you seen the Nothing, sonny?" "Yes, many times." "What does it look like?" "As if one were blind." "That's right – and when you get to the human world, the Nothing will cling to you. You'll be like a contagious disease that makes humans blind, so they can no longer distinguish between reality and illusion. Do you know what you and your kind are called there?" "No," Atreyu whispered. "Lies!" Gmork barked."

"When it come to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts."

"There is in Fantastica a certain place from which one can go anywhere and which can be reached from anywhere. We call it the Temple of a Thousand Doors. No one has ever seen it from outside. The inside is a maze of doors. Anyone wishing to know it must dare to enter it."

"Bastian had shown the lion the inscription on the reverse side of the Gem. "What do you suppose it means?" he asked. "'DO WHAT YOU WISH.' That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don't you think so?" All at once Grograman's face looked alarmingly grave, and his eyes glowed. "No," he said in his deep, rumbling voice. "It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult." "What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?" "It's your own deepest secret and you yourself don't know it." "How can I find out?" "By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want." "That doesn't sound so hard," said Bastian. "It is the most dangerous of all journeys." "Why?" Bastian asked. "I'm not afraid." "That isn't it," Grograman rumbled. "It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there's no other journey on which it's so easy to lose yourself forever.""

"He kept telling himself that he had made Yikka's dearest wish come true. But that didn't make him feel any better. A person's reason for doing someone a good turn matters as much as the good turn itself."

"Slowly the boy without a name reached for the gold chain around his neck and divested himself of AURYN. He bent down and carefully laid the Gem in the snow before Atreyu. As he did so, he took another look at the two snakes, the one light, the other dark, which were biting each other's tail and formed an oval. Then he let the amulet go. In that moment AURYN, the golden Gem, became so bright, so radiant that he had to close his eyes as though dazzled by the sun. When he opened them again, he saw that he was in a vaulted building, as large as the vault of the sky. It was built from blocks of golden light. And in the middle of this immeasurable space lay, as big as the ramparts of a town, the two snakes."

"The motionless bodies of the snakes glistened like some unknown metal, the one black as night, the other silvery white. The havoc they could wreak was checked only because they held each other prisoner. If they let each other go, the world would end. That was certain. But while holding each other fast, they guarded the Water of Life."

"I am the Water of Life, Out of myself I grow. The more you drink of me, The fuller I will flow."

"There are people that can't go to Fantastica. There are those who can but never return. And there are just a few who go to Fantastica and come back. And they make both worlds well again."

"There are many doors to Fantastica. There are other such magical books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who lays hands on the book."

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.""

"No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

"I was rather literary in college […] and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all."

"In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"All right.[…] I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high."

""I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally."

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

"People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away."

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

"On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn."

"[Gatsby] was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American — that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand."

"Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."

"It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.""

"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car."

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

"He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock."

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God — a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that — and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

"He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted."

"But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."

"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

"She was appalled by West Egg.[…]—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

"He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken."

"I wouldn’t ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can’t repeat the past." "Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. "I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She’ll see."

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete."

"That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!"

""Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money — that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it ... high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl..."

"It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well."

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control."

"So we drove on toward death in the cooling twilight."

"He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight — watching over nothing."

""They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time."

"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock—until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."

"Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. “God sees everything,” repeated Wilson."

"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.""

"That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. [...] I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, we're all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.[...] After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home."

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...."

"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"Nothing in this book is true. "Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." — The Books of Bokonon 1:5 *Harmless untruths"

"We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon ... "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba."

"All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

"Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you."

"[It] was about the end of the world in the year 2000 ... It told how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off."

"There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things 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?'"

"There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look."

"We talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things."

"[Dr. Asa Breed] said, the trouble with the world was... that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said that if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was."

"What is the secret of life?” I asked. “I forget,” said Sandra. “Protein,” the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein." "Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."

"Ah, God," says Bokonon, "what an ugly city every city is."

"My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur."

"She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind. The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking."

"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."

"I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all."

"Naomi Faust (secretary): “I’m indestructible. And even if I did fall, Christmas angels would catch me.” Dr Asa Breed (science administrator): “They’ve been known to miss.”"

"New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."

"Round and round and round we spin, With feet of lead and wings of tin..."

"I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things ... Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren't the main things with him. ... Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth. ... I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."

"There was one [conversation with Dr. Hoenikker] where he bet I couldn't tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, 'God is love' ... He said, 'What is God? What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, Baby don’t hurt me, no more.’"

"[Lyman Enders] Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure – offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ whenever he felt that he'd made a point."

"As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.""

"It’s a small world," I observed. "When you put it in a cemetery, it is."

"Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is."

"“Pretty? ... 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.”"

"“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”"

"“She said his mind was turned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars.”"

"The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels – tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wondering womankind, all wondering children."

"My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with."

"[Hazel Crosby's] obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him: If you wish to study a granfalloon Just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

"The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!"

"... I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it."

"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."

"The highest possible form of treason," said [Horlick] 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." "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places." "People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out ... that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn't pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved."

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on."

"It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping tension between the two high at all times."

"Never index your own book."

"Never had I seen a human being better adjusted to such a humiliating physical handicap. I shuddered with admiration."

"A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better."

"He reported his avocation as: “Being alive.” He reported his principal occupation as: “Being dead.”"

"The San Lorenzan National Anthem. Its melody was "Home on the Range." The words had been written in 1922 by Lionel Boyd Johnson, by Bokonon. The words were these: "Oh, ours is a land / Where the living is grand, / And the men are fearless as sharks; / The women are pure, / And we always are sure / That our children will all toe their marks. / San, San Lo-ren-zo! / What a rich, lucky island are we! / Our enemies quail, / For they know they will fail / Against people so reverent and free.""

"Every greedy, unreasonable dream I’d ever had about what a woman should be came true in Mona. There, God love her warm and creamy soul, was peace and plenty forever."

"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."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing."

"“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."

"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."

"My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?" "Don't try," [Castle] said. "Just pretend you understand."

"Her glissandi spoke of heaven and hell and all that lay in between. Such music from such a woman could only be the case of schizophrenia or demonic possession."

"Little Newt snorted. “Religion!” “Beg your pardon?” Castle said. “See the cat?” asked Newt. “See the cradle?”"

"If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he’s saved will equal the number of people he let die – in the year 3010."

"He had made me feel as though my own free will were as irrelevant as the free will of a piggy-wig arriving at the Chicago stockyards."

"I learned of the Bokononists cosmogony .. wherein Borasisi, the sun, held Pabu, the moon, in his arms, and hoped Pabu would bear him a fiery child. But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn; and Borasisi threw them away in disgust. Those were the planets who circled their terrible father at a safe distance. Then poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favourite child, which was Earth. Earth was Pabu’s favorite because it had people on it; and the people looked up to her and loved her and sympathised. And what opinion did Bokonon hold of his own cosmogony? "Foma! Lies!" he wrote. "A pack of foma!""

"“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”"

"Pay no attention when I laugh .. I'm a notorious pervert in that respect."

"“It is not possible to make a mistake,” she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not."

"Science is magic that works."

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

"I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific."

"I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done." "Nice going, God!" "Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have." "I feel very unimportant compared to You." "The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around."

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

""Now I will destroy the whole world." ... It’s what Bokonists always say when they are about to commit suicide."

"God never wrote a good play in His life."

"I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.""

"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."

"Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be."

"“History,” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!”"

"I am about to do a very un-ambassadorial thing ... I am about to tell you what I really feel. ... We are gathered here, friends ... to honor [the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy], children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which [the Martyrs] died, my own son died. My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child. I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all same. And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind. Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. ... [I]f today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war ... is today a day for a thrilling show? The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind."

"This wreath I bring is a gift from the people of one country to the people of another. Never mind which countries, think of people…"

"There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. ... [T]he sun became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes."

"And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away."

"I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons in the temperate zone should be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed. There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight. It was winter, now and forever."

"We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodely do, What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust."

"“He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”"

"It's all so simple, that's all. It solves so much for so many, so simply."

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'"

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

"“As far as I know, Bokononism is the only religion that has any commentary on midgets.”"

"The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world."

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

"Now the Tale of the Moody Land was one of Rashid Khalifa's best-loved stories. It was the story of a magical country that changed constantly, according to the moods of its inhabitants. In the Moody Land, the sun would shine all night if there were enough joyful people around, and it would go on shining until the endless sunshine got on their nerves; then an irritable night would fall, a night full of mutterings and discontent, in which the air felt too thick to breathe. And when people got angry the ground would shake; and when people were muddled or uncertain about things the Moody Land got confused as well - the outlines of its buildings and lamp-posts and motor-cars got smudgy, like paintings whose colours had run, and at such times it could be difficult to make out where one thing ended and another began... (Salman Rushdie)"

"Need's a funny fish; it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they won't always admit."

"Happy ending must come at the end of something. If they happen in the middle of the story or adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for a while."

"He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

"For the Philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabaptists), which is the only harbor, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea."

"For it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attractions for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book leaning, none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing an to be unable to read a virtue; no fancy that what we call ‘life’ and ‘reality’ are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality nor, indeed any equivalent for these two words at all. It was not to seek ‘life’ that Orlando went among them not in quest of ‘reality’ that he left them."

"At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it."

"Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation."

"While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace."

"Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust."

"Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions' paws with swans' necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough. People sitting in them, people lying in them improve them amazingly."

"The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast: — 'THE TRUTH! at which Orlando woke. He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman."

"The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace."

"We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he' — her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since."

"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue — But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water."

"The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …"

"Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see."

"Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage."

"Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever."

"On both sides of her sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence. … After three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left. But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings."

"The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails."

"Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."

"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."

"Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other."

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "Theres Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" ... Shall you mind?"

"Instead of visiting ten parties since you came here, laying ten women and getting drunk ten times, you've watched thirty days go by. Instead of making life a continual feast you chop it into days and swallow them regularly, like pills."

"Art is the only work open to people who can't get along with others and still want to be special."

"Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eightieth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness!"

"Remember, Duncan, when most people leave school they have to live by work which can't be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they're told to, and for no other reason, they'll be unfit for human society."

"I bet you felt very special and superior, being punished by God for something he doesnae give a damn for in other folk. Well, I hate to disappoint you, but ye may as well leave God and masturbation out of it and go back to having asthma in the normal way."

"People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon."

"A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it."

"I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don't." "I envy your purpose." "I envy your self-confidence." "Why?" "It makes you welcome at parties. It lets you kiss the host's daughter behind the sofa when you're drunk." "That means nothing, Duncan." "Only if you can't do it."

"I wish I was a duck on Alexandra Park pond. I could swim, and fly, and walk, and have three wives, and everything I wanted. But I'm a man. I have a mind, and three library tickets, and everything I want is impossible."

"Space is infinite to men without destinations."

"War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."

"Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom. - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim"

"When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around."

"There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."

"He who attempts to penetrate into the Rose Garden of the Philosophers without the key resembles a man who would walk without feet."

"Do not expect too much of the end of the world. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec"

"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."

"Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas — both false — can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better."

"A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it might be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."

"They remind me of Tom and Jerry."

"If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns."

"A map is not the territory."

"Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers ... ."

"I've seen your files, Pow," Lia said to me, "because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a look." And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy — she so slim and supple — with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority. "Pow, archetypes don't exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason, the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth , too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a baobab."

""It’s all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha — and you have to admit that’s a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and baptism. All right?” “Consider them rejected,” Belbo said."

""The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borbors, filth, because of the unspeakable things they do." "What do they do?" "The usual unspeakable things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb, pull out the embryo, throw it in a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up." "How revolting, honey and pepper!" Diotallevi said."

"Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text."

"Whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…"

"People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle."

"And Belbo, now invincible, said, Ma gavte la nata."

"The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: Who is in his place?"

"We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or rather They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion. But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist. Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map. We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep private frustration. What frustration? Belbo's first file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr."

"The true initiate is he who knows that the most powerful secret is a secret without content, because no enemy will be able to make him confess it, no rival devotee will be able to take it from him."

"There are no bigger secrets, because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little."

"The universe is peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel."

"You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justified birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was — full, dazzling, generous as every revelation."

"Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand."

"I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph. But I am here, and They are looking for me, thinking I possess the revelation They sordidly desire. It isn't enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate."

"It hurts me to think I won't see Lia again, and the baby, the Thing, Giulio, my philosopher's stone. But stones survive on their own. Maybe even now he is experiencing his Opportunity. He's found a ball, an ant, a blade of grass, and in it he sees paradise and the abyss. He, too, will know it too late."

""Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male", such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. Humbert Humbert, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start."

"Its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask — through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow — had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While Haze only rhymes with the heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so."

"This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify H.H.. No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! As a case history, Lolita will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac — these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us — parents, social workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world."

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

"You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set..."

"There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)."

"I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!"

"I have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards-presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion."

"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so."

"Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets.""

"Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine."

"Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"

"All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that 'princedom by the sea' in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy."

"Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes--for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate--while we moan and die."

"While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way — at least while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets."

"Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had."

"And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."

"Her brown rose tasted of blood."

"I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all."

"Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet"."

"Dying, dying, Lolita Haze, Of hate and remorse, I'm dying. And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying."

"In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years."

"All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us."

"The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive. Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."

"After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct."

"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."

"Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as "Old Europe debauching young America," while another flipper saw in it "Young America debauching old Europe.""

"As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage."

"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss."

"All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all."

"Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it."

"Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real."

"No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet."

"I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings."

"Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world."

"Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book — all right then — a great book."

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic European's hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there can't be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novel's many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Some say the Great American Novel is Huckleberry Finn, some say it's The Jungle, some say it's The Great Gatsby. But my vote goes to the tale with the maximum lust, hypocrisy and obsession — the view of America that could only have come from an outsider — Nabokov's Lolita. ... Those who bought "Lolita" looking for mere prurient kicks must surely have been disappointed. Lolita is dark and twisted all right, but it's also a corruptly beautiful love story of two tragically alike, id-driven souls... What makes Lolita a work of greatness isn't that its title has become ingrained in the vernacular, isn't that it was a generation ahead of America in fetishizing young girls. No, it is the writing, the way Nabokov bounces around in words like the English language is a toy trunk, the sly wit, the way it's devastating and cynical and heartbreaking all at once. Poor old Dolly Haze might not have grown up very well, but Lolita forever remains a thing of timeless beauty."

"Twenty-five years after Lolita's publication, as Edward Albee's dramatic adaptation prepares to open on Broadway, Nabokov's vision of American childhood seems nothing if not prescient. The public of 1956 was outraged not only by the thought of early sex but also by the image of a child so knowing, jaded and unchildlike. How much more familiar Lolita is today. There is no doubt that 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds of the 1980's have more in common with Lolita, at least in what they know, than with those guileless and innocent creatures in their shiny Mary Janes and pigtails, their scraped knees and trusting ways that were called children not so long ago."

"Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them."

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all."

"I have found always that the pattern of our guild is repeated [...] in the societies of every trade, so that they are all of them torturers, just as we. His quarry stands to the hunter as our clients to us; those who buy to the tradesman; the enemies of the Commonwealth to the soldier; the governed to the governors; men to women. All love what they destroy."

"I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind."

"The child, as I said, in time discovers The Book of Gold. Then the librarians come — like vampires, some say, but others say like the fairy godparents at a christening. They speak to the child, and the child joins them. Henceforth he is in the library wherever he may be, and soon his parents know him no more."

"One can't found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past—they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it."

"Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?"

"“I know little of the court, Chatelaine.” “The less you know, the happier you will be.”"

"It is said that it is the peculiar quality of time to conserve fact, and that it does so by rendering our past falsehoods true. So it was with me. I had lied in saying that I loved the guild—that I desired nothing but to remain in its embrace. Now I found those lies become truths."

"Art had been lavished upon her; but it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so, and so art had nothing to give her."

"Have I said that time turns our lies into truths?"

"Like all these religious arguments, this one gets less significant as we continue. Supposing the Conciliator to have walked among us eons ago, and to be dead now, of what importance is he save to historians and fanatics? I value his legend as a part of the sacred past, but it seems to me that it is the legend that matters today, and not the Conciliator’s dust."

"“There’s a great deal said against Death. I mean by the people that has to die, drawin’ her picture like a crone with a sack, and all that. But she’s a good friend to birds, Death is. Wherever there’s dead men and quiet, you'll find a good many birds, that’s been my experience.” Recalling how the thrushes sang in our necropolis, I nodded."

"Who it is I wouldn’t know, and since I don’t want to know my future—and I know my past, I should think, better than her—I don’t go near the cave. People come sometimes hopin’ to know when they’ll be married, or about success in trade. But I've observed they don’t often come back."

"The Increate maintains all things in order surely; and the theologicans say light is his shadow. Must it not be then that in darkness order grows ever less? [...] Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like the sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes—set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable—to be the real world."

"“The world is filled half with evil and half with good. We can tilt it forward so that more good runs into our minds, or back, so that more runs into this.” A movement of her eyes took in all the lake. “But the quantities are the same, we change only their proportion here or there.”"

"By the use of the language of sorrow I had for the time being obliterated my sorrow—so powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us."

"I think it is in this that we find the real difference between those women to whom if we are to remain men we must offer our lives, and those who (again–if we are to remain men) we must overpower and outwit if we can, and use as we never would a beast: that the second will never permit us to give them what we give the first."

"There was something underneath, something else, a face like the face poison would have, if poison had a face."

"A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart."

"The soldiers forced him to his knees and I lifted my sword, forever blotting out the sun."

"To those who have preceded me in the study of the posthistoric world, and particularly to those collectors—too numerous to name here—who have permitted me to examine artifacts surviving so many centuries of futurity, and most especially to those who have allowed me to visit and photograph the era's few extant buildings, I am truly grateful."

"That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin."

"We try to keep the traders honest that come to our fairs. It’s only good business. If he doesn’t make them right for you, whoever he is, we’ll duck him in the river, you may be sure. One or two ducked a year keep the rest from feeling too comfortable."

"Myself, I don’t believe—or rather, I think that if the Pancreator don’t care nothing for me, I won’t care nothing for him, and why should I?"

"There is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after."

"I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself for not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often."

"All the boasted human panoply of pillars and arches is no more than an imitation in sterile stone of the boles and vaulting branches of the forest."

"I have often heard it said that gratitude is not to be found. That is not true—those who say so have always looked in the mistaken place. One who truly benefits another is for that moment at a level with the Pancreator, and in gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days."

"Those who wish no change may sit hugging their scruples forever."

"He had a slightly cynical detachment from mankind that suggested he had seen a great deal of the world."

"We were one, naked and happy and clean, and we knew that she was no more and that I still lived, and we struggled against neither of those things, but with woven hair read from a single book and talked and sang of other matters."

"I am much older than you are. Older than you think. If there is one thing I have learned in so many voyages, it is that the dead do not rise, nor the years turn back. What has been and is gone does not come again."

"In silence two praetorians (four fluttering sparrows, as it seemed) caught our destriers and led them away. How like us those animals were, walking patiently they knew not where, their massive heads following thin strips of leather. Nine-tenths of life, so it seems to me, consists of these surrenders."

"Men to whom wine had brought death long before lay by springs of wine and drank still, too stupefied to know their lives were past."

"Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. [...] Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of a delightful character. Some will say they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have "recovered" from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is."

"Women believe—or at least often pretend to believe—that all our tenderness for them springs from desire; that we love them when we have not for a time enjoyed them, and dismiss them when we are sated, or to express it more precisely, exhausted. There is no truth in this idea, though it may be made to appear true. When we are rigid with desire, we are apt to pretend a great tenderness in the hope of satisfying that desire; but at no other time are we in fact so liable to treat women brutally, and so unlikely to feel any deep emotion but one."

"Dorcas drew back. “Magic, you mean?” “There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”"

"The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self. I have found a thing stranger: to explore such a city only after one has lived in it for some time without learning anything of it."

"I found I could not say what it was I understood; that it was in fact on the level of meaning above language, a level we like to believe scarcely exists, though if it were not for the constant discipline we have learned to exercise upon our thoughts, they would always be climbing to it unaware."

"Just as the room of the Inquisitor in Dr. Talos's play, with its high judicial bench, lurked somewhere at the lowest level of the House Absolute, so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present."

"How strange it is that the sky, which by day is a stationary ground on which the clouds are seen to move, by night becomes the backdrop for Urth's own motion, so that we feel her rolling beneath us as a sailor feels the running of the tide."

"That was the brightest day I've ever seen. The sun had new life in him, the way a man will when he was sick yesterday and will be sick tomorrow, but today he walks around and laughs so that if a stranger was to come he'd think there was nothing wrong, no sickness at all, that the medicines and the bed were for somebody else."

"I am not clever—I am too strong for cleverness, as you well understand."

"An angel is often only a demon who stands between us and our enemy."

"The progress of science depends much less upon theoretical considerations or systematic investigation than is commonly believed, but rather on the transmittal of reliable information, gained by chance or insight from one set of men to their successors. The nature of those who hunt after dark knowledge is to hoard it even unto death, or to transmit it so wrapped in disguise and beclouded with self-serving lies that it is of little value."

"[T]he very existence of such powers argues a counterforce. We call powers of the first kind dark, though they may use a species of deadly light... and we call those of the second kind bright, though I think that they may at times employ darkness, as a good man nevertheless draws the curtains of his bed to sleep. Yet there is truth to the talk of darkness and light, because it shows plainly that one implies the other. The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's. We, then, are syllables of that word. But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken. If a beast has but one cry, the cry tells nothing; and even the wind has a multitude of voices, so that those who sit indoors may hear it and know if the weather is tumultuous or mild. The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak... and these words must be maintained in a quasi-existence, if the other word, the word spoken is to be distinguished. What is not said can be important - but what is said is more important... And if the seekers after dark things find them, may not the seekers after bright find them as well? And are they not more apt to hand their wisdom on?"

"I realized that what disturbed me was the memory of the lies I had told the magicians, pretending, as they did, to command great powers and be privy to vast secrets. Those lies had been wholly justifiable—they had helped to save my life and little Severian’s. Nevertheless, I felt myself somewhat less of a man because I had resorted to them. Master Gurloes, whom I had come to hate before I left the guild, had lied frequently; and now I was not sure whether I had hated him because he lied, or hated lying because he did it."

"Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain. I knew then, on the arm of that giant figure, the ambition to conquer time, an ambition beside which the desire of the distant suns is only the lust of some petty, feathered chieftain to subjugate some other tribe."

"If I had seen one miracle fail, I had witnessed another; and even a seemingly purposeless miracle is an inexhaustible source of hope, because it proves to us that since we do not understand everything, our defeats—so much more numerous than our few and empty victories—may be equally specious."

"When I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had not been Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a particular person again, and so I sought the mirror of other persons, which would show me that I was not as they were."

"One of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply."

"Not dead. Why had he thought that every life must end in death, and never in anything else? Not dead, but vanished as a single note vanishes, never to reappear, when it becomes an indistinguishable and inseparable part of some extemporized melody."

"He waited for me to speak. I had the feeling, which I have often had when talking with old people, that the words he said and the words I heard were quite different, that there was in his speech a hoard of hints, clues, and implications as invisible to me as his breath, as though Time were a species of white spirit who stood between us and with his trailing sleeves wiped away before I had heard it the greater part of all that was said."

"Llibio had worn a fish carved from a tooth about his neck; and when I asked him what it was he had said it was Oannes, and covered it with his hand so that I my eyes could not profane it, for he knew that I did not believe in Oannes, who must surely be the fish-god of these people. I did not, yet I felt I knew everything about Oannes that mattered. I knew that he must live in the darkest deeps of the lake, but that he was seen leaping among the waves in storms. I knew he was the shepherd of the deep, who filled nets of the islanders, and that murderers could not go on the water without fear, lest Oannes appear alongside, with his eyes as big as moons, and overturn the boat. I did not believe in Oannes or fear him. But I knew, I thought, whence he came - I knew that there is an all-pervasive power in the universe of which every other is the shadow. I knew that in the last analysis my conception of that power was as laughable (and as serious) as Oannes."

"I had not thought, when I began this record of my life, to reveal any of the secrets of our guild [...] But I will tell one now, because what I did that night on Lake Diuturna cannot be understood without understanding it. And the secret is only that we torturers obey. [...] No one truly obeys unless he will do the unthinkable in obedience; no one will do the unthinkable save we."

"Dr. Talos whispered, "Look about you—don't you recognize this? It is just as he says!" "What do you mean?" I whispered in return. "The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark, our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.""

"The best way to describe silence is to say nothing—but what grace!"

"At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, theodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of arguments, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible."

"I had never seen war, or even talked of it with someone who had, but I was young and knew something of violence, and so believed that war would be no more than a new experience for me... War is not a new experience; it is a new world. Its inhabitants are more different from human beings that Famulimus and her friends. Its laws are new, and even its geography is new, because it is a geography in which insignificant hills and hollows are lifted to the importance of cities. Just as our familiar Urth holds such monstrosities as Erebus, Abaia and Arioch, so the world of war is stalked by monsters called battles, whose cells are individuals but who have a life and intelligence of their own, and whom one approaches through an ever-thickening array of portents."

"There is a payment made by Nature to those who undergo hardships; it is that the lesser ones, at which people whose lives have been easier would complain, seem almost comfortable."

"When we sleep," Merryn told me, "we move from temporality to eternity." "When we wake," the Cumaean whispered, "we lose the facility to see beyond the present moment."

"Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails..."

"This is a true story. I know many stories. Some are made up, though perhaps the made up ones were true in times everyone has forgotten."

"Most men think they make their home for their families, but the fact is that they make both homes and families for themselves."

"Every person, you see, is like a plant. There is a beautiful green part, often with flowers or fruit, that grows upward toward the sun, toward the Increate. There is also a dark part that grows away from it, tunneling where no light comes. [...] Was I speaking of good and evil? It is the roots that give the plant the strength to climb toward the sun, though they know nothing of it. [...] The things we love in others and admire in ourselves spring from things we do not see and seldom think about."

"The pancreator is infinitely far from us," the angel said, "And thus infinitely far from me, though I fly so much higher than you. I guess at his desires—no one can do otherwise."

"It often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music; the rest, mercy, beauty, sleep, clean water and hot food [...] are all the work of the Increate. Thus, stories are small things indeed in the scheme of the universe, but it is hard not to love best what is our own."

"Surely I have no complaint of you, though you must have many of me. One I shall not deserve. It shall not be said that I did not do what I might to undo the harm I have done."

"In a fable made in the earliest morning of our race, a man sold his shadow and found himself driven out everywhere he went. No one would believe that he was human" "Did this man ever regain his shadow, Master Ash?" "No. But for a time he traveled with a man who had no reflection."

"Resolution and a plan are better than a sword, because a man whets his own edges on them."

"Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something. You are yourself what you call a man of science, so I talk of science to you."

"“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of winning.” I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations winning consisted of disentangling oneself."

"Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes almost more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced but defiled."

"Each rider seemed to have a personal spell; and it was easy to see, as I watched their numbers shrink under the bombardment, how such primitive minds come to believe in their charms, for the survivors could not but feel their thaumaturgy had saved them, and the rest could not complain of the failure of theirs."

"By each step in war the winner loses."

"There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity."

"You were a danger to them unless you were terribly punished because they might otherwise someday be tempted. A judge or a jailer who has no crime of his own is a monster, alternately purloining the forgiveness that belongs to the Increate alone and practicing a deathly rigor that belongs to no one and nothing."

"“Why did you kill Thecla?” “I did not. Your error lies in thinking I am at the bottom of everything. No one is...Not I, or Erebus, or any other."

"Because the prehistoric cultures endured for so many chiliads, they have shaped our heritage in such a way as to cause us to behave as if their conditions obtained today."

"There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?"

"There was a cook who so despised the armigers and exultants for whom he prepared food that, in order that he should never have to bear the indignity of their reproaches, he did everything with a feverish perfection. He was eventually made chief of the cooks of that wing."

"When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize."

"The sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground."

"“You have bettered yourself,” he said, making such a low bow that the tassel of his cap swept the carpet. “You may recall that I invariably affirmed you would. Honesty, integrity, and intelligence cannot be kept down.” “We both know that nothing is easier to keep down,” I said. “By my old guild, they were kept down every day.”"

"We’ll both be glad of the company, like the undertaker remarked to the ghost."

"Love is a long labor for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed it or not."

"A few of the rooms into which I looked held walls in which there had once ticked a thousand or more clocks of various kinds, and though all were dead now, their chimes silenced and their hands corroded at hours that would never come again, I thought them good omens for one who sought the Atrium of Time."

"This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace."

"So it goes."

"The smell of mustard gas and roses."

""You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?" "No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?" "I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'" 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."

""I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby," I said. "The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad." (pp. 4-5)"

"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. (p. 11)"

""You were just babies then!" she said. "What?" I said. "You were just babies in the war — like the ones upstairs!" I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. "But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation. "I — I don't know," I said. "Well I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs." So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: "Mary," I said, "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it The Children's Crusade." She was my friend after that."

"I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. (p. 18)"

"It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?""

"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. (p. 19)"

"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. (pp. 21-22)"

"People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." It ends like this: "Poo-tee-weet?" (p. 22)"

"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."

"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. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

"As part of the gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger — from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch thirty feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss. (p. 34)"

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. (p. 39)"

"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: "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. (p. 60)"

"If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob! (p. 67)"

"American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. 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. (pp. 74-75)"

"Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?" "That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?" "Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it. "Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." (pp. 76-77)"

"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. (p. 86)"

""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." (p. 86)"

"There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

"The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. (p. 96)"

"[Eliot] Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy [Pilgrim] one time … He said that everything there was to know about life is in "The Brothers Karamazov," by Fyodor Dostoevsky. "But that isn't enough anymore," said Rosewater. (p. 101)"

"She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all. (p. 102)"

"How nice — to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. (p. 105)"

"You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.'" (p. 106)"

"It was The Gospel From Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space... [who] made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought...: Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of the Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections! (pp. 108-110)"

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. (p. 122)"

"An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (p. 125)"

"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. (p. 129)"

""Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut," murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. "Go take a flying fuck at the moon." (p. 147)"

"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. (p. 167)"

""Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control. (p. 171)"

"“I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.” Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified. Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage. (p. 172)"

""You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?" Trout asked Billy. "No." "The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him. He thinks he's standing on thin air. He'll jump a mile." (p. 175)"

"Billy didn’t really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease. (p. 192)"

"Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, "I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war." (p. 193"

"Billy turned on his television set, clicking its channel selector around and around. He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it goes. (pp. 199-200)"

"My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust. (p. 210)"

""Poo-tee-weet?" (p. 215; closing words)"

"April 24 - Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic. It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishin, something new is born. The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant."

"April 29 - And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kind of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes to watch a movie. So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow humans takes no longer than"

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and tries to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots."

""A is not A," Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his, "Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System." I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty lady I always imagine is really lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. "What do you mean?" I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park. "Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled; "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does the whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other." "Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing that night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society." "Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic." "Just like Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belongs to the people. The next day it belongs to the landlords." "And like the Narcotic Acts," he added. "A hundred thousands harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in 1927. Ten years later, in '37, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second." And I had my answer to Dad, finally, just as a cop jumped out of the darkness screaming something about freaking motherfucking fag commies and Maced me, as was certain to happen (I knew it as I crumbled in pain) on that set."

"If you whistle while you're pissing, you have two minds, where one is quite sufficient. If you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote. "A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him.""

"In a previous incarnation, Harry saw himself as as centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he said to Jesus, "nothing personal. I'm only following orders." "So am I." Jesus said, "My Father's orders. Aren't we all?""

"That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a fullgrown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottles neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?"

"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, you'll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute."

"Feeling paranoid? Good: illumination is on the other side of absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realising that you can't believe anything you've ever been told. You have to realise fully that you are "a stranger and afraid in a world you never made," like Houseman said."

"You look blank, Joe," said Malaclypse. "Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes - neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest neophile-neophobe conflicts on record."

"Well, sir," said Cartwright "my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as light and gravity do. Therefor, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If our four amino acids - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - suddenly became life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA life. Okay so far? If awareness is life, and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of the universe's sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You might think of it as a giant, selfcontained eye. Consciousness is therefor also manifested as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Those phenomena are simply non-localized versiosn of consciousness. I'm very interested in telepathy, and I've had a lot of succes with telepathic research. These cases of communication are just further evidence that consciousness is a seamless web throughout the universe."

""He [Hegel] is perfect... Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language."

"Correctly formulated, the Law [of Fives] is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator."

"How do we know whether the Universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can't say that the universe is getting bigger is relation to anything outside it, because there isn't any outside for it to relate to. There isn't any outside. But if the universe doesn't have an out-side, then it goes on forever. How do you know it doesn't, shithead? You're just playing with words, man. -No I'm not. The universe is the inside without an outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we walk together in a single public universe that we can share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia. Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But all the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a true universe such as we have only imagined previously. Maybe it will be spiritual, like Zen or telepathy, or maybe it will be physical, one great big gang-fuck, but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva! -Oh, man, you're stoned out of your gourd. You're writing gibberish. No, I'm writing with absolute clarity, for the first time in my life. -Yeah? Well what was that business about the universe being the sound of one eye opening? Never mind that. Who the hell are you and how did you get into my head?"

"THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!"

"Everybody is crazy," Saul said patiently, "if you don't understand his motives."

"Only the madman is ever sure."

"You cannot understand a man's actions unless you understand his beliefs."

"If you have any answers, We will be glad to provide full and detailed questions."

"Sir," Pozzo said, "be so kind as to make way for us, for we must go and take up our proper position in order to fire on you." The officer doffed his hat, bowed with a salute that would have swept dust two meters before him, and said: "Señor, no es menor gloria vencer al enemigo con la cortesía en la paz que con las armas en la guerra." Then, in good Italian, he added: "Proceed, sir. If a fourth of our men prove to have one half of your courage, we will win. May Heaven grant me the pleasure of meeting you on the field of battle, and the honor of killing you."

"Dissimulating means drawing a veil composed of honest shadows, which does not constitute falsehood but allows truth some respite. The rose seems beautiful because at first sight it dissimulates, pretending to be so fleeting, and although it is frequently said of mortal beauty that is seems not of this earth, it is simply a corpse dissimulated by the favor of youth."

"Keep calm. You are speaking of love, you are not loving."

"You must know that beneath this foolishness lies a mystery."

"From the way he recalls it on the Daphne, I tend to believe that at Casale, while he lost both his father and himself in a war of too many meanings and of no meaning at all, Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives. If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of perimeters, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most lost of peripheries, because, if there was a center, it lay before him, and he was its immobile satellite."

"If it seems strange that during a week or more on board the ship Roberto had not succeeded in seeing everything, suffice it to recall what happens to a boy who climbs into the attics or cellars of a great and ancient dwelling, irregular in its plan. At every step cases of old books appear, discarded clothing, empty bottles, and piles of fagots, ruined furniture, dusty and rickety cupboards. The boy advances, lingers on the discovery of some treasure, glimpses and entrance, a dark passage, and imagines some alarming presence there, postpones the search to a later occasion, and he proceeds always in tiny steps, on the one hand fearing to go too far, on the other, in anticipation of future discoveries, yet daunted by the emotion of the recent ones, and that attic or cellar never ends, and can have in store for him enough new nooks and crannies to last through his boyhood and beyond. And if the boy is frightened every time by new noises, or if—to keep him away from those labyrinths—he is daily told terrifying tales (and if that boy, in addition, is drunk), obviously the space will expand at each new adventure. Such was Roberto's life in the exploration of his still hostile territory."

"We have said that he had no particular inclination not to believe what the Jesuit was telling him. But often he enjoyed provoking him to make him say more, and then Roberto would resort to the whole repertory of argumentation he had picked up in the gatherings of those fine gentlemen that the Jesuits considered if not emissaries of Satan, at least topers and debauchees who had made the tavern their lyceum."

"I lack the courage to summarize all of Roberto's summary, so I will only mention the fourth side, which supposedly expounded all the wonders of botanical medicine, spagyrical, chemical, and hermetical, with simple and compound medicines derived from mineral or animal substances, and the "Alexipharmaca, attractive, lenitive, purgative, mollificative, digestive, corrosive, conglutinative, aperitive, calefactive, infrigidative, mundificative, attenuative, incisive, soporative, diuretic, narcotic, caustic, and comfortative.""

"But an amorous symbol is forgiven many things, and it never ceases to attract poets."

"The dove is there to signify that the world speaks in hieroglyphics, and there is a hieroglyph that itself signifies hieroglyphics. And a hieroglyph does not say and does not conceal; it simply shows."

"Indeed, as he sees it distant not only in space but also (backwards) in time, from this moment on, whenever he mentions that distance, Roberto seems to confuse space and time, and he writes, "The bay, alas, is too yesterday," and ,"How much sea separates me from the day barely ended," and even, "Threatening rainclouds are coming from the Island, whereas today it is already clear . . . . But if the Island moves ever farther away, is it still worth the effort to learn to reach it?"

"Only a nose bleeding because struck by a falling fruit would really allow him to understand, at one blow, both the laws that draw the grave to gravity and de motu cordis et anguinis in animalibus."

"The jealous man is not able, nor does he have the will, to imagine the opposite of what he fears, indeed he cannot feel joy except in the magnification of his own sorrow, and by suffering through the magnified enjoyment from which he knows he is banned. The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell—in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond."

"By inventing the story of another world, which existed only in his mind, he would become that world's master, able to ensure that the things that happened there would not exceed his capacity for endurance."

"On the other hand, for all their virtues, romances have their defects, which Roberto should have known. As medicine teaches also about poisons, metaphysics disturbs with inopportune subtelties the dogmata of religion, ethics recommends magnificence (which is not of help to everyone), astrology fosters superstition, optics deceives, music rouses lust, geometry encourages unjust dominion, and mathematics avarice—so the art of Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us."

"The virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table. [...] He could not help but be of lively intelligence, even when constrained to villany, and in that environment he immediately learned how to behave. [...] Ferrante cultivated his own mediocrity (the baseness of his bastard origins), not fearing to be eminent in mediocre things, so as to avoid one day being mediocre in eminent things. He understood that when you cannot wear the skin of the lion, you wear that of the fox, for after the Flood more foxes were saved than lions. Every creature has its own wisdom, and from the fox he learned that playing openly achieves neither the useful nor the pleasurable."

"Espionage (Roberto was shocked and terrified), the most contagious plague of courts, harpy that swoops down on the royal table with rouged face and hooked claws, flying on batwings and listening with ears endowed with great tympana, an owl that sees only in the dark, a viper among roses, cockroach on flowers converting into venom the juice it sips at its sweetest, spider of antechambers weaving the strands of its subtle talk to catch every passing fly, parrot with curved beak reporting everything it hears, transforming truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth, chameleon that receives every color and dresses in all save the one that is its true garb. All qualities of which anyone would be ashamed, save the one who by divine (or infernal) decree is born to the service of evil."

"Oh Love, Love, Love, have you not punished me enough already, is this not a death undying?"

"I shall surely die, he said to himself, if not now thanks to the Stone Fish, in any case later[...] What illusion was I harboring? I would die, perhaps later, even if I had not arrived on this wreck. I entered life knowing that the Law requires us to leave it. As Saint-Savin said, we play our role, some long, some not so long, and then we leave the stage. I have seen others go before me, others will see me go, and they will give the same performance for their successors. For that matter, how long was the time when I did not exist, and for how long in the future will I not be? I occupy a very small space in the abyss of the years. This little interval does not succeed in distinguishing me from the nothingness into which I shall go. I came into the world only to swell the ranks. My part was so small that even had I remained in the wings, everyone would still have declared the play perfect. It is like a storm at sea: some drown immediately, others are dashed against the rocks, still others are cast up on an abandoned ship, but not for long, not even they. Life goes out, on its own, like a candle that has consumed its substance. And we should be accustomed to it, because, like a candle, we have been shedding atoms since the moment we were lit. It is no great wisdom to know these things, Roberto told himself..."

"... We should know them from the moment we are born. But usually we reflect always and only on the death of others. Ah ye, we all have strength enough to bear others' ills. Then the moment comes when we think of death because the illness is our own, and we realize it is impossible to stare directly at the sun and at death. Unless we have had good teachers. I did. Someone said to me that truly few know death. As a rule it is tolerated through stupidity or habit, not through resolve. We die because we cannot do otherwise. Only the philosopher can think of death as a duty, to be performed willingly and without fear. As long as we are here, death is not here, and when death comes, we have gone. Why would I have spent so much time conversing about philosophy if now I were not capable of making my death the masterwork of my life? [...]He told himself that thinking of origins is proper to the philosopher. It is easy for the philosopher to justify death: the we must plunge into obscurity is one of the clearest things in the world. What obsesses the philosopher is not the naturalness of the end, it is the mystery of the beginning. We can lack interest in an eternity that will follow us, but we cannot elude the anguished question of which eternity preceded us: the eternity of matter or the eternity of God?"

"And we, inhabitants of the great coral Cosmos, believe the atom (which we still cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness and that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything. So here I am illuding myself with the illusion of an illusion—I, an illusion myself? I, who was to lose everything, happened on this vessel lost in the Antipodes only to realize that there was nothing to lose? But, understanding this, do I not perhaps gain everything, because I become the one thinking point at which the Universe recognizes its own illusion?"

"He did not know that, especially when their authors are now determined to die, stories often write themselves, and go where they want to go."

"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental."

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles did.""

"If this isn't nice, what is?"

"There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time."

"It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now."

"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."

"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."

"You want to know why I don’t have AIDS, why I'm not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don’t fuck around. It’s as simple as that."

"If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off."

"She was a widow, and he stripped himself naked while she went to fetch some of her husband's clothes. But before he could put them on, the police were hammering on the front door with their billy clubs. So the fugitive hid on top of a rafter. When the woman let in the police, though, his oversize testicles hung down in full view." Trout paused again. "The police asked the woman where the guy was. The woman said she didn't know what guy they were talking about," said Trout. "One of the cops saw the testicles hanging down from a rafter and asked what they were. She said they were Chinese temple bells. He believed her. He said he 'd always wanted to hear Chinese temple bells. "He gave them a whack with his billy club, but there was no sound. So he hit them again, a lot harder, a whole lot harder. Do you know what the guy on the rafter shrieked?" Trout asked me. I said I didn't. "He shrieked, 'TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!'"

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

""If I'd wasted my time creating characters," Trout said, "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction."

"Western Civilization's second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide."

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

"I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife."

"I thank [Kilgore] Trout for the concept of the man-woman hour as a unit of measurement of marital intimacy. This is an hour during which a husband and wife are close enough to be aware of each other, and for one to say something to the other without yelling, if he or she feels like it. Trout says in his story "Golden Wedding" that they needn't feel like saying anything in order to credit themselves with a man-woman hour. [...][A character in Trout's story] calculates that an average couple with separate places of work logs four man-woman hours each weekday, and sixteen of them on the weekends. Being asleep with each other doesn't count. This gives him a standard man-woman week of thirty-six man-woman hours.He multiplies that by fifty-two. This gives him, when rounded off, a standard man-woman year of eighteen hundred man-woman hours. He advertises that any couple that has accumulated this many man-woman hours is entitled to celebrate an anniversary..."

"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."

"There is a planet in the solar system, where the people are so stupid they didn't catch on for a million years that there was another half to their planet. They didn't figure that out until five hundred years ago!"

"Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful."

"In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse."

"All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this."

"I always had trouble ending short stories in ways that would satisfy a general public. In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don’t change, don’t learn anything from their mistakes, and don’t apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters."

"Artists [...] are people who say "I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!""

"If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, "art or not," you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. [...] The situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. [...] There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. [...] If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not their pictureness. [...] There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time."

"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."

"The British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: The 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. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: "Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!""

"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."

"Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do.""

"The self-respects of most middle-class American people my age or older, and still alive, are out to pasture now, not a bad place to be. They munch. They ruminate. If self-respect breaks a leg, the leg can never heal. Its owner has to shoot it."

"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!"

"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.""

"I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth's performance in Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was "the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.""

"Adam and Eve, more in love than they have ever been before, tell Him that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime."

"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 am a fool. Wild again, beguiled again, a whimpering, simpering child again. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I."

"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgment Day: We never asked to be born in the first place."

"I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosion...no Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercials...no Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes -- no income tax. The climate is the sort that Florida and California claim (and neither has), the land is lovely, the people are friendly and hospitable to strangers, the women are beautiful and amazingly anxious to please. I could go back. I could.."

"I was twenty-one but couldn’t figure out which party to vote against."

"I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it's not his choice."

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."

"There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods — pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. That's conscription even if you call it "selective service" and pretty it up with USOs and "veterans' benefits" — it's tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits."

"It wasn’t a war — not even a “Police Action.” We were “Military Advisers.” But a Military Adviser who has been dead four days in that heat smells the same way a corpse does in a real war."

"Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department."

"Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored."

"There are wonderful night clubs in Nice but you need not patronize them as the floor show at the beaches is as good ... and free. I never appreciated what a high art the fan dance can be until the first time I watched a French girl get out of her clothes and into her bikini in plain sight of citizens, tourists, gendarmes, dogs — and me — all without quite violating the lenient French mores concerning "indecent exposure." Or only momentarily."

"I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or "security." There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be. Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest..."

"I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be — instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance — for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be — And I had known it ... and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get."

"ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person..."

"I picked up and balanced them all... and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur. I've never seen one quite like it so I don't know what to call it. A saber, I suppose, as the blade was faintly curved and razor sharp on the edge and sharp rather far back on the back. But it had a point as deadly as a rapier and the curve was not enough to keep it from being used for thrust and counter quite as well as chopping away meat-axe style. The guard was a bell curved back around the knuckles into a semi-basket but cut away enough to permit full moulinet from any guard. It balanced in the forte less than two inches from the guard, yet the blade was heavy enough to chop bone. It was the sort of sword that feels as if it were an extension of your body."

"I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible. So I chucked logic. Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

"Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover."

"A man who always obeys the law is even stupider than one who breaks it every chance."

"The person who says smugly that good manners are the same everywhere and people are just people hasn’t been farther out of Podunk than the next whistle stop."

"I learned, first time out on patrol, that nothing hikes up that old biological urge like being shot at and living through it."

"“This is a crazy sort of country, you must admit. Utterly insane.” “Mmmm...” he answered. “Have you ever been in Washington, D. C.?” “Well—” I grinned wryly. “Touché!”"

"Oscar, so far as I know, your culture is the only semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art and given the serious study it deserves."

"May it please milord Hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be. Either way, it is what it is."

"Natural law never takes a holiday. The invariability of natural law is the cornerstone of science."

"An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey; I have none."

"Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person."

"An old family recipe: 'Eye of newt and toe of frog, 'Wool of bat and tongue of dog, 'Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, 'Lizard's leg and howlet's wing — '" "Shakespeare!" I said. "Macbeth." "'Cool it with a baboon's blood — ' No, Will got it from me, milord love. That's the way with writers; they'll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own."

"Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake any government can make."

"No evolutionary quirk can be considered odd if you use the way octopi make love as a comparison."

"There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is—and doesn’t forgive ignorance."

"Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things — ways that work but often we don't know why."

"She drew the true paths in glowing red, false ones in green — and there was a lot more green than red. The critter who designed that tower had a twisty mind. What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg — then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnum's "This Way to the Egress.""

"These Gates are not true gates; there is always a matter of timing. This one will be ready to open, for a few minutes, about seven hours from now, then cannot be opened again for several weeks."

"Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn't serious, nor anything with rules) — all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude."

"A properly balanced sword is the most versatile weapon for close quarters ever devised. Pistols and guns are all offense, no defense; close on him fast and a man with a gun can't shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and you'll be spitted like a roast pigeon — unless you have a blade and can use it better than he can. A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can't be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months."

"I did the only really brave thing I have ever done in my life: I inched forward. Bravery is going on anyhow when you are so terrified your sphincters won't hold and you can't breathe and your heart threatens to stop, and that is an exact description for that moment of E. C. Gordon, ex-Pfc. and hero by trade. I was fairly certain what those two faint lights were and the closer I got the more certain I was — I could smell the damned thing and place its outlines. A rat. Not the common rat that lives in city dumps and sometimes gnaws babies, but a giant rat, big enough to block that rat hole but enough smaller than I am to have room to maneuver in attacking me — room I didn't have at all. The best I could do was to wriggle forward with my sword in front of me and try to Keep the point aimed so that I would catch him with it, make him eat steel—because if he dodged past that point I would have nothing but bare hands and no room to use them."

"There is a go-for-broke tactic, "the target," taught by the best swordmasters, which consists in headlong advance with arm, wrist, and blade in full extension — all attack and no attempt to parry. But it works only by perfect timing when you see your opponent slacken up momentarily. Otherwise it is suicide."

"I knew in three seconds that I was up against a better swordsman than myself, with a wrist like steel yet supple as a striking snake. He was the only swordsman I have ever met who used prime and octave — used them, I mean, as readily as sixte and carte. Everyone learns them and my own master made me practice them as much as the other six — but most fencers don't use them; they simply may be forced into them, awkwardly and just before losing a point. I would lose, not a point, but my life — and I knew, long before the end of that first long phrase, that my life was what I was about to lose, by all odds."

"Sword-play is an odd thing; you don't really use your mind, it is much too fast for that. Your wrist thinks and tells your feet and body what to do, bypassing your brain..."

"He smiled at his own wit. The old bastard always had thought he was a wit. He was half right."

"Don't worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones — and this one isn't primitive."

"Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not "Empress" and it is not an empire. I'll go on calling her "Star" as hundreds of names were hers and I'll call it an "empire" because no other word is close, and I'll refer to "emperors" and "empresses" — and to the Empress, my wife. Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of "natural" laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam's Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes "places," where human beings live. I won't try to say what lives elsewhere. The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires — yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum."

"The one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don't do anything. Always King Log, never King Stork — "Live and let live." "Let well enough alone." "Time is the best physician." "Let sleeping dogs lie." "Leave them alone and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them." Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors' Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don't demand justice, you too will be judged. Above all, don't put serious problems to a popular vote."

"Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in many primitive societies ... but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”"

"I asked him how advanced societies ran things. His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”"

"The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive — and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity, never seeking perfection, no Utopias — just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes. Local affairs are local. Infanticide? — they're your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief — the Empire is ponderously unhelpful."

"Why should anybody want power? I can’t understand it. But some do, and they did."

"I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean "magic." How many times have savages concluded "magic" when a "civilized" man came along with something the savage couldn't understand? How often is some tag, such as "television," accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when "magic" would be the honest word? Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it. But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor."

"She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off."

"Culturologists state a "law" of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a "law of nature." Rufo didn't agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable — holes in their heads! — and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out wherever possible."

"I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together."

"What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?"

"I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion—as if adding zeros could produce a sum."

"Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group. "But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn't work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn't rigid. The framework doesn't matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros."

"Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time — unless its looseness is destroyed from inside."

"Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won't be one of the herd. I respect you, and I don't respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to 'respect' and even to 'love' the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn't a political system, it's a disease."

"Scoundrels are predictable, but you’re a man of honor and that frightens me."

"Would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy."

"You’re not a fool, you’re merely young."

"You were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, you're never a puppet, or you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She searched until She found him ... and honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? It's not common in America."

"“Oscar, when you get home, don’t expect too much of your feminine compatriots. You’re sure to be disappointed and the poor dears aren’t to blame. American women, having been conditioned out of their sex instincts, compensate by compulsive interest in rituals over the dead husk of sex...and each one is sure she knows ‘intuitively’ the right ritual for conjuring the corpse. She knows and nobody can tell her any different...especially a man unlucky enough to be in bed with her. So don’t try. You will either make her furious or crush her spirit. You’ll be attacking that most Sacred of Cows: the myth that women know all about sex, just from being women.” Rufo had frowned. “The typical American female is sure that she has genius as a couturière, as an interior decorator, as a gourmet cook, and, always, as a courtesan. Usually she is wrong on four counts. But don’t try to tell her so. ...But don’t misunderstand me; it evens out. The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is.”"

"I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to— He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.” “Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out."

""I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees." A long road, a trail, a "Tramp Royal," with no certainty of what you'll eat or where or if, nor where you'll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done."

"Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon?"

"Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren't dull around him — and he would die defending your rear. So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all! Got any dragons you need killed?"

"If found, please return to workroom B19, Main Library, Pollard State University Hey — I found your stuff while I was shelving. (Looks like you left in a hurry!) I read a few chapters & loved it. Felt bad about keeping the book from you though, since you obviously need it for your work. Have to get my own copy! — Jen"

"Of course there is a monkey. There is always a monkey."

"Fans of S. don't just ask each other if they've read the book — they ask each other how they read it. Written by Doug Dorst (with inspiration from concept creator and "novelrunner" J.J. Abrams), the book is a singular experience: Within a worn library copy of fictional author V. M. Straka's nineteenth and final novel, Ship of Theseus, are two readers who've found each other in the margins. There are issues of identity on all fronts — S, the protagonist in Ship of Theseus, has amnesia, and doesn't know who he is; V.M. Straka, his author, is said not to exist and may be a pseudonym for a number of candidates; Eric, a grad student studying Ship of Theseus, is hoping to solve that question of authorship for his dissertation, but he, too, doesn't officially exist, as his university has expunged him. Along comes an undergrad named Jen who picks up Eric's copy of the book, reads his notes, and starts writing notes to him in the margins as she gets pulled into Straka's work and the mysteries surrounding both him and Eric. It's a labyrinth of story-within-story, especially when you consider the footnotes are ciphers."

"Mel Blanc as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck"

"Leon Schlesinger as Himself"

"Fred Jones as Animator"

"Michael Maltese as Security Guard"

"Gerry Chiniquy as Himself"

"Henry Binder and Paul Marin as Stagehands"

"No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the withering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed."

"Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience."

"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."

"The very words "California Bound" are dusted in gold & beckon all men thitherwards like moths to a lantern."

"To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom."

"The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."

"That love loves fidelity [...] is a myth woven by men from their insecurities."

"People knelt in prayer, some moving their lips. Envy 'em, really I do. I envy God, too, privy to their secrets. Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street."

"Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff."

"Et si vous nuisez à ma réputation, eh bien, il faudra que je ruine la vôtre!"

"Anything is true if enough people believe it is."

"...the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories."

"They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars."

"I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold."

"Did I ever lie to get my story? Ten-mile-high whoppers every day before breakfast, if it got me one inch closer to the truth"

"This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," says the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."

"You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap–I mean, it's not ruddy Luxembourg we live in–but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters."

"That autumn night long ago Ursula had served a blob of grilled cheese on a slice of shame on a breast of chicken. Righter there—right here. I could still taste it. I can taste it as I write these words."

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

"Your version of the truth is the only one that matters. Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths."

"Rumors ricocheted around the dome: a Yoona had kidnapped a boy, no, a baby; no, a pureblood had kidnapped a Yoona; an enforcer had shot a boy; no, a fabricant had hit the seer whose nose was bleeding. All the while, Papa Song surfed noodle waves on His Plinth."

"What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars."

"You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively."

"Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to."

"[...] If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term."

"Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime."

"[...] the verb remember is outside servers' lexicons."

"I'm shoutin' back more'n forty long years at myself, yay, at Zachry the Niner, Oy, list'n! Times are you're weak 'gainst the world! Times are you can't do nothin'! That ain't your fault, it's this busted world's fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachry, he don't hear me nor never will."

"[...] Smart'n'Civ'lize ain't nothin' to do with the color o' the skin, nay."

"Valleysmen only had one god an' her name it was Sonmi. Savages on Big I norm'ly had more gods'n you could wave a spiker at. [...] But for Valleysmen savage gods weren't worth knowin', nay, only Sonmi was real."

"Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more."

"Valleysmen'd not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true."

"Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I. Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds."

"[...] ev'ry drumbeat one more life shedded off of me, yay, I glimpsed all the lives my soul ever was till far-far back b'fore the Fall,[...]"

"But ain't dyin' terrorsome cold if there ain't nothin' after? Yay—she sort o' laughed but not smilin', nay—our truth is terrorsome cold."

"List'n, savages an Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals, an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some Savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not 'nuff to sayso their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day. "One day" was only a flea o' hope for us. Yay, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', but fleas ain't easy to rid."

"I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds."

"Travel far enough, you meet yourself."

"A Soul's value is the dollars therein."

"Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

"Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren't all Union agents. Even Yoona~939 chose death over slavery."

"He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity."

"What you describe is beyond the... conceivable, Sonmi~451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap... no. The charge is preposterous, no, it's unconscionable, no it's blasphemy! As an Archivist I can't deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must, must, have been a Union... set, created for your benefit. No such... "slaughtership" could possibly be permitted to xist. The Beloved Chairman would never permit it! The Juche would ionize Papa Song's entire exec strata in the Litehouse! If fabricants weren't paid for their labor in retirement communities, the whole pyramid would be... the foulest perfidy. Business is business."

"[...] in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."

"Many xpert witnesses at. our trial denied Declarations could be the work of a fabricant, ascended or otherwise, and maintained it was ghosted by Union or a pureblood Abolitionst. How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand."

"Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?"

"The ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!"

"We–by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offense is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight."

"Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured."

"Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?"

"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."

""Now you just look here, you grebo, you can go shag your bloody sporran if you think—" One of his teeth splashed into my Kilmagoon, fifteen feet away. (I fished the tooth out to keep as proof of this unlikely claim, otherwise no one will ever believe me.)"

"The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will."

"Whoever said money can't buy you happiness[...] obviously didn't have enough of the stuff."

"What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?"

"[...]The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy." "Not choked by welfare, unions, 'affirmative action' for amputee transvestite colored homeless arachnophobes..." "A meritocracy of acumen. A culture that is not ashamed to acknowledge that wealth attracts power..." "... and that the wealthmakers—us—are rewarded. When a man aspires to power, I ask one simple question: 'Does he think like a businessman?'" Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. "I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?"

"Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway."

"We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrien's cut threes, fours, and fives. That's all."

"Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks war? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will… The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QES, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."

"Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents."

"[...] science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction. [...] Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man , are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!"

"Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so."

"People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function."

"Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."

"[...] of all the world's races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers, our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side."

"Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boer-haaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this: — one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword."

"One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction."

"A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living."

"I hear my father-in-law's response[...] "Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"