There Bomar is, wherever he is, spending a fortune every day on liquor and beautiful women and expensive playthings, when he could find peace of mind right here with us, for a mere twenty cents.–“Bomar

Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are.

I’m wild again, beguiled again, a wimpering, simpering child I am.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something...

The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it-and so were most of the mediocre people we grew up with, went to private schools with, sailed...

I hear he liked flowers pretty well.””Yes,” said Annie, “he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him.”–“Out, Brief Candle

I think it’s important to live in a nice country rather than a powerful one. Power makes everybody crazy.

My own feeling is that if adultery is wickedness then so is food. Both make me feel so much better afterward.

I thought the worst of everyone.

There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message– describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other....

‎The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking...

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn’t like my parents. I didn’t have any...

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

There’s only one me, and I’m stuck with him.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn’t want to be used by anybody.

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a...

It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of...

The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing,...

There were no windows in the Stockholders’ Records Section of the Treasurer’s Department of the American Forge and Foundry Company. But the soft, sweet music from the loudspeaker on the green wall by the clock,...

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.

Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done

There’s the whole story of life!

He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,’ the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. ‘Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d...

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want...

Bush used that line recently. I should sue him for plagiarism.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living...

Anyway—because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from...

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write...

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old time big brains. They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would...

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, the demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of...

They made a science out of people?” she said. “What a crazy science that must be.”–“Mr. Z

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward – always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that...

I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.

Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her “Jackie dress” swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and...

in nonsense is strength

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives...

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

So it goes.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.