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“I think you’ll find,” said Dr. Breed, “that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.”
The miracle of Felix—and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere—was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.”
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.” “And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.
He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “ ‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’”
Midgets are, after all, diversions for silly or quiet times,
He resolved to let the adventure run its full course, resolved to see just how far a man might go, emerging naked from salt water. It was a rebirth for him:
Be like a baby, The Bible say, So I stay like a baby To this very day.
I wanted all things To seem to make some sense, So we all could be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise.
“She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for.”
“A pissant is somebody who thinks he’s so damn smart, he never can keep his mouth shut. No matter what anybody says, he’s got to argue with it. You say you like something, and, by God, he’ll tell you why you’re wrong to like it. A pissant does his best to make you feel like a boob all the time. No matter what you say, he knows better.”
“This is what I’d call a hotel with a real heart. How many hotel owners would take such a direct interest in the comfort of a guest?” “How many hotel owners have just one guest?” “You used to have three.” “Those were the days.”
“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”
“The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
