Rel > Rel's Quotes

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“If you love something, let it go.
If you don't love something, definitely let it go.
Basically, just drop everything, who cares.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

“Regret is just perfectionism plus time.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

“I could imagine being his mom and loving him a lot, if that makes sense.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

“You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“- Why me?
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
- Yes.
- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

“All this happened, more or less.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-five

“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.

I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for awhile after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody.

They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that no one was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it.’

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”
― Akira Kurosawa

“The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

“I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.”
― Philip Roth