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Quote-a-thon

Some nuggets of wisdom from my latest reads.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in A Man Without A Country
"Okay, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It's because most of is don't have extended families anymore. It used ot be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man.

When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it's about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: 'You are not enough people!' "


"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?'

But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake."



And Rick Bass, in Winter
"This froth-without-vent will kill me someday if I ever slow down, if I ever stop exercising. Such anger is not a good habit, but I can do nothing about it except fight, or run.

So I run. Thinking about the expatriate writers of the twenties and thirties, and the most famous one - was it Ezra Pound? - who said he had abandoned his country because he could not bear to see what it had become.

How would he like it fifty years later?

I'm hiding up here - no question about it.

The decay in our nation is frustrating. We truly are becoming senile. I feel as if we are very near the end; each time I go to a city I feel it more and more. All I want to do is get back to Yaak, back to the snow, back up into the mountains.

I'm wondering if I've already fizzled out, died, and up here, in the snow and the mountains, I have already begun an afterlife. I think that is what it may be. I have never seen any of these things before."


"There are two worlds for me - and for anybody, I think - and I do better in one than in the other. I used to be able to exist in both, but as I pay more and more attention to the one world, the world of the woods and of this valley, I find myself, each day, less and less able to operate in the other world."

posted by Werd @ 8:29 PM