(no subject)
"Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment."
'"Never trust a survivor, " my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind," until you find out what he did to stay alive."'
"It was hard to believe how sick of war we used to be. We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington. We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?"
"The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War."
"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"
"I am from another planet. I have no way of caring what you are or what you want or what you do. Buster, you have been colonized."
"I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn't have when I married her."
"'Flense?" he said. "What's flense?"
"It's what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board," I said. "They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people- get read of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.'"
"'We're having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true," I said. "That's how to act at a party.'"
"Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform," she said.
"I know Big John Karpinski was," I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something.
But then Little John came home in a body bag."
Bluebeard
Kurt Vonnegut
By far the BEST of his work I've read thus far.