“Keep your hat on.
We may end up miles from here!”
*
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.”
*
“True terror is to wake up one morning
and discover that your high school class
is running the country.”
*
“A purpose of human life, no matter
who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
*
“My father was a gun nut, like Ernest
Hemingway, mainly to prove that he wasn’t effeminate, even though he was an architect and a painter. He didn’t get drunk and slug people. Shooting animals was enough.”
*
“The good earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
*
“We have to be constantly jumping
off cliffs and developing our wings
on the way down.”
*
“You’re learning that you do not inhabit
a solid, reliable social structure—that the older people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So homes can fall
apart and schools can fall apart, usually
for childish reasons . . .”
*
“Those who believe in telekinetics,
raise my hand.”
*
“When things go well for days on end,
it is a hilarious accident.”
*
“Make love when you can.
It’s good for you.”
*
“Male American artists don’t even have to shoot off guns anymore. They can even be homosexuals, and the hell with it.
This is good.”
*
“Queer travel suggestions are
dancing lessons from God.”
*
“Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. And since the creator of the universe is unknowable to us so far, we serve as best we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which
is our community.”
*
“Another flaw in the human character is
that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to maintain it.”
*
“Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will
get an enormous reward. You will have
created something.”
*
“There is only one rule that I know of, babies—, Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
*
“I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.”
*
“A sane person in an insane society
must appear insane.”
*
“It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.”
*
“Dear future generations:
Please accept our apologies.
We were roaring drunk on petroleum.”
*
“We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet—the only one in the whole Milky Way—with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war on drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum! Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”
*
“We are dancing animals.”
*
“Hopelessness is the mother
of originality.”
*
“Librarians, not famous for their physical
strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from
their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who
have checked out those titles.”
*
“I was a victim of a series
of accidents, as are we all.”
*
“I’m a space wanderer named Kurt.”
*
“So it goes . . .”
*
