Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God

Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Painters–and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

E qualsiasi sogno di aiutare la nostra gente rischia di essere parimenti un ermafrodito travestito se non si prepara un progetto per darci tutto il conforto e la compagnia delle famiglie allargate, all’interno delle quali...

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Make me young, make me young, make me young!

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

And so it goes…

Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning...

I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not anymore. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in...

It’s a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience — voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.

Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.

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...

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...

Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest...

A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much....

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief.For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my...

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going,...

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share...

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other...

and I’m whistling as beautifully as I can.

I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government. Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on the...

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .””And?””No damn...

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of...

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let’s get back...

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such...

What is my definition of jazz? ‘Safe sex of the highest order.

He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was–if you couldn’t run a machine. A duel...

We’re really awful animals. I mean, that dumb Barbra Streisand song, ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’ – she’s talking about cannibals. Lot’s to eat.

Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say ‘Shut up, I just got here myself’.

How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)

It’s a small world.” . . . “When you put it in a cemetery it is.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk...

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

I told him that if we doubted that we are demons in Hell, he should read The Mysterious Stranger, which Mark Twain wrote in 1898, long before the First World War (1914-1918). In the title...

You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead, I’m going to forget everything–and I advise you to do the same.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a...

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with...

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not...

The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy’s mustache.

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times,...