[quotes] Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut 1963

 

"I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon."

"Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either."

"'There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.'"

"'New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.'"

"'I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.'"

"As the driver talked to the salesman I wandered among the monuments - blank monuments, monuments in memory of nothing so far."

"'The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!'"

"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise."

"'People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.'"

"'It is not possible to make a mistake,' she assured me. I did not know that this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person."

"'I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.'"

"And I found it impossible not to lean on God. I had never needed such support before, and so had never believed that such support was available."

"So good and evil had to remain separate; good in the jungle, and evil in the palace. Whatever entertainment there was in that was about all we had to give the people."

"The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did."

[quotes] American Gods - Neil Gaiman 2001

 

"I was used to telling stores that people liked, or that they didn't read. I'd never written anything divisive before. But with this book, people either loved it, or they hated it."

"One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands [...] When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said 'They're scared to pass the ocean, it's too far,' pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America." - Richard Dorson

"He did not awake in prison with a feeling of dread; he was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it."

"Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit."

"The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later."

"Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual."

"Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all."

"Their priests died without passing on their secrets."

"She told them all these things, and they believed, because she believed."

"'Lady Liberty,' said Wednesday. 'Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner.'"

"'This is the only country in the world [...] that worries about what it is [...] The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.'"

"All we have to believe with is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted."

"I feel sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull [...] for they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not."

"Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances."

"Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world [...] It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat."

"If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories."

"'Which way would you walk - the way of the hard truths or the way of fine lies?'"

"We do not remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness."

"God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city [...] someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition."

"Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world."

"'You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we're the ones who get sick.'"

"'But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it."

"He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or it if was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough."

[quotes] Ready Player One - Ernest Cline 2011

 

"It was a partnership destined to alter the course of human history."

"As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus."

"Even in the throes of an ongoing economic recession, the OASIS allowed Americans to continue engaging in their favorite pastime: shopping."

"'It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,' he wrote. 'A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.'"

"I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal." - Groucho Marx

"Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself."

"'No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.'"

"A thick film of neglect still covered everything in sight. The streets, the buildings, the people."

[quotes] Chocolat - Joanne Harris 1999

 

"With Armande there was only the hunger, the desire, the terrible awareness of time."

"I dared not acknowledge him, as if by so doing I should be obliged to admit a responsibility of which silence might absolve me."

"I envy the table its scars, the scorch marks caused by the hot bread tins. I envy its calm sense of time, and I wish I could say: I did this five years ago [...] I envy the table's calm sense of place. It has been here a long time. It belongs."

"'Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.'"

"Small comforts in defiance of the dark."

[quotes] The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert 2014

 

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul"
- Alexander Pope

"In fact, the American mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it."

"At the heart of Darwin's theory, as one of his biographers has put it, is 'the denial of humanity's special status.'"

"Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible."

"'It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct.'"

"Virtually every species that's around today can be said to be cold-adapted."

"Lovejoy is the rare sort of person who seems equally comfortable slogging through the forest and testifying in front of Congress."

"Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants."

"What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, [Quammen] observes, 'is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.'"

"For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity - the total number of different species that can be found worldwide - has dropped."

"Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did."

"When he finally came around to the idea that Neanderthals bequeathed some of their genes to modern humans, he told me, 'I thought it was very cool. It means that they are not totally extinct - that they live on a little bit in us.'"

"'It's only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don't see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, madness there.'"

"With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it."

"in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results."

"in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

"Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathway will remain open and which will be forever closed."