"His voice, though powerful, was mild. Voice of a dead thing, calm as dry sticks and ice when the wind blows over them. He had a strange face that, little by litte, grew unsettling to me: it was a face, or so it seemed for an instant, from a dream I had almost forgotten. The eyes slanted downward, never blinking, unfeeling as a snake's. He had no more beard than a fish. He smiled as he spoke, but it was as if the gentle voice, the childlike yet faintly ironic smile were holding something back, some magician-power that could blast stone cliffs to ashes as lighting blasts trees."

"It is I," I say. "The Destroyer."

"Tedium is the worst pain."

"Something is coming, strange as spring. I am afraid."

"I am not the only monster on these moors. I met an old woman as wild as the wind Striding in white out of midnight's den. Her cloak was in rags, and her flesh, it was lean, And her eyes, her murdered eyes..."

"All systems are evil. All governments are evil. Not just a trifle evil. Monstrously evil."

""If you want me to help you destroy a government, I'm here to serve. But as for Universal Justice--" He laughed."

"Nihil ex nihilo, I always say."

"The trees are dead. The days are an arrow in a dead man's chest."

"Grendel is crazy, O,O,O! Thinks old Hrothgar Makes it snow!"

"Pity poor Grengar, Hrothdel's foe! Down goes the whirlpool: Eek! No, no!"

"Pity poor Hrothgar, Grendel's foe! Pity poor Grendel, O,O,O!"

"I will count my numberless blessings one by one. I. My teeth are sound. I. The roof of my cave is sound. I. I have not committed the ultimate act of nihilism: I have not killed the queen. I. Yet."

"(O hear me, rocks and trees, loud waterfalls! You imagine I tell you these thing just to hear myself speak? A little respect there, brothers and sisters!"

"I am mad with joy.--At least I think it's joy."

"All pigs eat cheese. Old Snaggle is a pig. If Snaggle is sick and refuses to eat, try cheese."

"“You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shirk from—the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment—that’s what you make them recognize, embrace! You are mankind, or man’s condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain.”"

"“Nevertheless, something will come of all this,” I said. “Nothing,” he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity. My advice to you—” “Wait and see,” I said. He shook his head. “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”"

"Personally," he said, "my great ambition is to count all this," --he waved vaguely at the treasure around him--"and possibly sort it into piles."

"He reshapes the world," I whispered, belligerent. "So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold."

""The Shaper may yet improve men's minds, bring peace to the miserable Danes." But they were doomed, I knew, and I was glad. No denying it. Let them wander the fogroads of Hell."

"Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite."

"He closed his eyes, still smiling. "Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream.""

"(Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.)"

"I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back."

"And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war. The pain of it! The stupidity!"

"That night, for the first time, I saw men."

"What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way--and so did me"

""I've never seen a live hero before. I thought they were only in poetry. Ah, ah, it must be a terrible burden, though, being a hero--glory reaper, harvester of monsters! Everybody always watching you, weighing you, seeing if you're still heroic. You know how it is--he he! Sooner or later the harvest virgin will make her mistake in the haystack." I laughed."

""Hey!" he yelled. A forgivable lapse."

"Such is life," I said, and mocked a sigh. "Such is dignity."

"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."

"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!"

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

"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 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!""

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

"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."