Timequake
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between November 29 - December 13, 2023
8%
Flag icon
a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.
8%
Flag icon
It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse. Never mind cases of extreme discomfort, such as idealists’ being crucified. Two important women in my life, my mother and my only sister, Alice, or Allie, in Heaven now, hated life and said so. Allie would cry out, “I give up! I give up!” The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: “I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached ...more
9%
Flag icon
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.”
11%
Flag icon
didn’t mind writing it again. Rerun or not, he could tune out the crock of shit being alive was as long as he was scribbling, head down, with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad.
11%
Flag icon
The more the pilot thought about it, though, the surer he was that his sweet widowed mother could never tell reporters she was happy that her son’s airplane had killed a world’s record number of civilians all at once.
13%
Flag icon
“It was all here for me, just as it has all been for you, the best and the worst of Western Civilization, if you cared to pay attention: music, finance, government, architecture, law and sculpture and painting, history and medicine and athletics and every sort of science, and books, books, books, and teachers and role models. “People so smart you can’t believe it, and people so dumb you can’t believe it. People so nice you can’t believe it, and people so mean you can’t believe it.”
13%
Flag icon
“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. “He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. “Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this ...more
15%
Flag icon
When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture and market these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved.
16%
Flag icon
Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.
16%
Flag icon
Why not? What the heck.
16%
Flag icon
Trout said at the clambake in 2001 that life was undeniably preposterous. “But our brains are big enough to let us adapt to the inevitable pratfalls and buffoonery,” he went on, “by means of manmade epiphanies like this one.” He meant the clambake on a beach under a starry sky. “If this isn’t nice, what is?” he said.
17%
Flag icon
What hit me really hard that night, though, was the character Emily’s farewell in the last scene, after the mourners have gone back down the hill to their village, having buried her. She says, “Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
18%
Flag icon
Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis.
19%
Flag icon
“In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing,” he said. “But nothing implies something, just as up implies down and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and happy implies sad. I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?
20%
Flag icon
The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess. Kilgore Trout was hooked on making idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. He was a black hole to anyone who might imagine that he or she was a friend of his.
23%
Flag icon
The minds of children in intellectually humble American homes back then weren’t swamped with countless stories from TV sets. They heard or read only a few stories, and so could remember them, and maybe learn something from them. Everywhere in the English-speaking world, one of those was “Cinderella.” Another was “The Ugly Duckling.” Another was the story of Robin Hood. And another, as disrespectful of established authority as the story of Robin Hood, which “Cinderella” and “The Ugly Duckling” are not, is the life of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament.
27%
Flag icon
“What grownups had done to grownups left no doubt that the human race should be exterminated,” said Trout. “Rehashing ad nauseam what grownups had done to children would be gilding the lily, so to speak.”
34%
Flag icon
If a patient accidentally said “I” or “me” or “my” or “myself” or “mine,” Dr. Schadenfreude went ape. He leapt out of his overstuffed leather chair. He stamped his feet. He flapped his arms. He put his livid face directly over the patient. He snarled and barked things like this: “When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your stuck-up butt the hell out of here!”
35%
Flag icon
Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn’t peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.
39%
Flag icon
Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the Universe has been to us unknowable so far. We serve as well as we can the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.
39%
Flag icon
I like to sleep. I published a new requiem for old music in another book, in which I said it was no bad thing to want sleep for everyone as an afterlife. I see no need up in the sky for more torture chambers and Bingo games.
42%
Flag icon
I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn’t talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say.
43%
Flag icon
fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person. I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people!”
44%
Flag icon
still can’t get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
52%
Flag icon
And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry
53%
Flag icon
“Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
57%
Flag icon
All male writers, incidentally, no matter how broke or otherwise objectionable, have pretty wives. Somebody should look into this.
58%
Flag icon
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
59%
Flag icon
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: “What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?”
60%
Flag icon
My wife thinks I think I’m such hot stuff. She’s wrong. I don’t think I’m such hot stuff. My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy. That’s how I feel.
70%
Flag icon
Art is so absorbing. It is a sopper-upper.
77%
Flag icon
No matter what is doing the creating, I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous.
77%
Flag icon
For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it
77%
Flag icon
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
77%
Flag icon
Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons. They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything.
78%
Flag icon
I of course understand that the widespread revulsion inspired even now, and perhaps forever, by the word Communism is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidities of the dictators of the USSR, who called themselves, hey presto, Communists, just as Hitler called himself, hey presto, a Christian. To children of the Great Depression, however, it still seems a mild shame to outlaw from polite thought, because of the crimes of tyrants, a word that in the beginning described for us nothing more than a possibly reasonable alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot.
79%
Flag icon
I said at the time that I had to respect the opinion of my friend William Styron that the Hiroshima bomb saved his life. Styron was then a United States Marine, training for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, when that bomb was dropped. I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.
80%
Flag icon
Kilgore’s Creed: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
81%
Flag icon
“America,” wrote Kilgore Trout in MTYOAP, “is the interplay of three hundred million Rube Goldberg contraptions invented only yesterday. “And you better have an extended family,”
88%
Flag icon
Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!
89%
Flag icon
I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times.
89%
Flag icon
Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
96%
Flag icon
what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably.