Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

She was what fate had given him to love, and he did his best to love her. He knew her too well for her conceits to be offensive most of the time, to be anything but pathetic.

This is maybe the saddest description of a relationship I’ve ever read.

“You shouldn’t let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.” “Well, it doesn’t.” Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.

aboard the 12:52, where he shared an ancient coach, half cuspidor, half humidor, with sixty troops on furlough

The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

“Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave,”