Kurt Vonnegut
Quotes
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.
"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.
“History,” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!”
"My God — life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?""Don't try," [Castle] said. "Just pretend you understand."
Pay no attention when I laugh .. I'm a notorious pervert in that respect.
My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.
He reported his avocation as: "Being alive."He reported his principal occupation as: "Being dead."
[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.
Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
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."
"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."
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.
