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“Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“You made sure you’d still have something worth wishing for—to get out of the cage.”
Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him.
“I don’t have nerve enough to commit suicide,” she said, “so I might as well do anything anybody says—in the service of mankind.”
idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
“If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?”
I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was.
