"He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."
— Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

""When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.""
— Charles Frazier

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
— Aldous Huxley

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
— Aldous Huxley

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
— Aldous Huxley

"The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant."
— Aldous Huxley

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
...
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
...
"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
...
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
...
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
...
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
...
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
...
"Stability was practically assured."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
— Aldous Huxley

"I am I, and I wish I weren't."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
— Aldous Huxley

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder."
— Aldous Huxley

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way to make life more bearable."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense.
And I made up lies, so
they all fit nice,
and I made this sad world
a paradise"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Be patient, Ophelia.

Love,
Hamlet"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt.
"Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired.
"Very good answer."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"A sane person to an insane society must appear insane."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Welcome to the Monkey House)

"Ting-a-ling mother fucker."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed.
In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were.
And with good reason.
In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want.
Piece of cake.
In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.
Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything.
Piece of cake.
The O'Reilly Factor.
So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times."
Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there.
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?
Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine.
My last words? "Life is no way to treat and animal, not even a mouse."
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard)

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
— Sylvia Plath

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath