More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” —Thoreau
I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write I simply become what I seemingly must become.
And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: “Here I am cleaning shit off of practically everything” and “No pain.”
The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts.
“Well,” I said, “as long as people have to come along with the machines, I guess we’re all right.” “What?” she said. “When machines start delivering themselves,” I said, “I guess that’s when the people better start really worrying.”
When I meet somebody nice in real life, I feel as though I were in some kind of big bottle, as though I couldn’t touch that person, no matter how hard I tried.”
The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex. Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.
“If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth—those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for any-thing and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.
He covered his shyness by speaking absently, as though what really concerned him were far away—as though he were a secret agent pausing briefly on a mission between beautiful, distant, and sinister points.
“Now can we take a walk?” he said. “One foot in front of the other—through leaves, over bridges——”
He had the sensation of burrowing, burrowing, burrowing his way through a mountain of hot sand, of having to keep going on and on, digging, squirming, suffocated, blinded.
When human beings are attacked, x, multiplied by hundreds or thousands, must die—sent to death by those who love them most.
Death through a blunder she might be able to understand; but death as a product of cool reason, a step in logic, she could never accept. Rather than accept it, she would have had them all die.
Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn’t paid much attention to it.
The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it.
As a matter of fact, it’s a respectful thing to say that somebody is childish in certain ways, because it’s people like that who seem to get all the big ideas.
He was what we used to call absent-minded. Looking back now, of course, we say he was starting to be amphibious.
“If living matter was able to evolve enough to get out of the ocean, which was really quite a pleasant place to live, it certainly ought to be able to take another step and get out of bodies, which are pure nuisances when you stop to think about them.”
“Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it.” A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy. “How?” said Jim. “Love yourself,” said Helmholtz, “and make your instrument sing about it.
