Satirists From The United States

"In the digital age our idea of political activism is forwarding an e-mail. You copy four people and think, "I've done my part for today.""

"Pearl Harbor the movie, arguably, was worse than the invasion itself."

"Do you remember when you used to be able to remember five phone numbers?"

"Do you think Beethoven had any inkling in even the darkest recesses of his unconscious, when he was deaf and sweating over his Fifth Symphony, that one day it would emit from some idiot’s pocket, and the response would be "Darn, it’s my mom"?"

"The only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment."

"He [George W. Bush] was speaking in congress and he was saying "Why do they hate us? Because of what’s going on right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Except for me, of course. I took the presidency in a bureaucratic coup with the help of my father’s friends in the courthouse around the corner.""

"There is no way I was buying my wife a gun, because, let's be honest, there is no way I wasn't getting shot with that gun. Buying my wife a gun is sorta like me saying "Y'know, I kinda wanna kill myself...but I want it to be a surprise.""

"I think the reason why we're so disconnected and depressing is that...we don't talk to God anymore - or rather, he doesn't talk to us. Remember back in the day? He used to just come out of nowhere. 'Abraham?! Guess who?!...that's right, it's God, you're a genius...' He would then tell them to do something and then BAM! it would get done. Who's he talking to now?!...I don't know! I think he's talking to those homeless guys that talk to themselves. You know, the ones that walk down the street arguing with themselves going 'I can't!...I can't!!!!!' ...what if at the other end of that conversation was 'You're the new leader!' 'I can't!...I can't!!!!!' They're not crazy homeless people...they're reluctant prophets!...better tip them an extra buck the next time you see 'em."

"We certainly showed those Afghanis for what those Saudis did. But hey, can’t dump where you eat, you know?"

"The FBI and the CIA, I really thought they had everything under control. I thought they knew what was going on with everybody. I thought they had a camera in the air in a satellite right now taking very accurate pictures of my prostate. I thought they had that kind of technology. I thought they knew everything about everybody, but it turns out they’re really no different than many other government bureaucracies, say, the Post Office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Just, uh, you know, 50-60 year old men waiting for their pensions to kick in. Except for the three that let the attack [9/11] happen. They’ve been promoted."

"Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power."

"The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning."

"Interviewer: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle?"

"Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, “Stop!”? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, “No, Hoyt,” in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table."

"Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but... revealing themselves for the first time and happening... Now... as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is one with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabs — A-rabs behind the eyelids, eyelid movies, room for them and a lot more in the five billion thoughts per second stroboscope synapses — his A-rab heroes, fine Daily Double horsehair mustaches wrapped about the Orbicularis Oris of their mouths — Face! The doctor comes back in and, marvelous, poor tight cone ass, doc, Kesey can now see into him."

"Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus.""

"One of the shrewdest observers of our times, Tom Wolfe, used to be fond of employing the French term nostalgie de la boue, coined in 1855 by the French dramatist Émile Augier. It translates as “nostalgia for the mud.” Or what Merriam-Webster now defines as “attraction to what is crude, depraved, or degrading.”"

"Interviewer: You didn't read The Right Stuff."

"At certain points, reading [A Man in Full] can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist — how you resist! — letting three hundred pounds take you over."

"Images of cars and highways fill our literature, songs, movies and art, not just in America but worldwide. Books like "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe were among the first to romanticize driving and road trips. Old blues and early rock songs like "Route 66," "Brand New Cadillac," and "Goin' Mobile" further romanticized cars and highways for the postwar "Baby Boom" generation. Thousands of films and T.V. shows have focused on or predominantly featured cars and car chases: "Rebel Without a Cause," "American Graffiti," "Easy Rider," "Bullet," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "James Bond" films, and at least half a dozen Burt Reynolds movies. The list goes on... All this pop culture, combined with relentless commercial advertising, has made cars an integral part of our personal identity. We have been taught to equate motor vehicles with wealth, power, romance, rebellion and freedom. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I see cars-millions and millions of cars-in Rome, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay and Beijing. Everywhere there are huge traffic jams and poor air quality. The number of motor vehicles in the world is growing three times faster than the population."

"He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."

"A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power."

"...Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs."

"The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times."

"He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about — "—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to —" — all in a plain country accent about something — well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said. "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said. He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch — lightning."

"At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."

"I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergents and jeeps which jump over mountains."

"You don’t understand me… I’m a teenager. I’ve got problems!"

"Vince Fusilli held up his lighter… It was the best we could do for an eternal flame."

"So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations."

"We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t."

"The blue slate roof… visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown… There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the back yard and was left on the ground… Mrs Higbie insisted that Mr Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters."

"Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up. The paper tablecloth, spotted with mice droppings… A brownish scum of punch… sprinkled with flies… A profusion of withered balloons hung from the ceiling… The domino game still called for a three or a seven."

"“Obviously, Doctor… you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.""

"They knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all."

"The room’s changes- water bugs adhering to walls, one bobbing dead mouse- only heightened what hadn’t changed"

"We had never known them. They had brought us here to find that out."

"A series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them."

"The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut."

"We realised that the version of the world they had rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass, they didn't give a damn about lawns."

"“I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”"

"The flagpole that had flown at half-mast the day Cecilia died, though it had been summer and no one but the lawn crew had noticed"

"Everybody had a story as to why she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "she wanted out of that decorating scheme.""

"We realized that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that .no one was ever going to love us for our good grades."

"The small statue of a girl… donated in memory of Laura White, her bronze skirt just beginning to oxidize. Scars crossed her welded wrists, symbolically, but the Lisbon girls didn’t notice."

"I don't know what you think you're trying to do, but the krauts ought to pin a medal on you for helping them mess up discipline for us."

"Sergeant Bill Mauldin seemed to us over there to be the finest cartoonist the war had produced. And that's not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real. Mauldin's cartoons aren't about training-camp life, which is most familiar to people at home. They are about the men in the line — the tiny percentage of our vast Army who are actually doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war."

"While a guy at home is sweating over his income tax and Victory garden, a dogface somewhere is getting great joy out of wiggling his little finger. He does it just to see it move and to prove to himself that he is still alive and able to move it."

"More than anyone else, save only Ernie Pyle, he caught the trials and travails of the GI. For anyone who wants to know what it was like to be an infantryman in World War II, this book is the place to start — and finish."

"It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together."