Brian > Brian's Quotes

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
― kurt vonnegut

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“More of your conversation would infect my brain.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“If e'er again I meet him beard to beard, he's mine or I am his.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“Now put your shields before your hearts and fight / With hearts more proof than shields. Advance, my fellows!”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“And Sir, it is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“For the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.”
― Amy Hempel

“Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?”
― Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage: Stories

“Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.”
― Amy Hempel

“Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!”

“Hush John,” Florida said. “That’s only phantom pain.”

“Is it real?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “All pain is real.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Death is healing, it tells us to forgive, it reminds us that we don’t want to die alone.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Everything good or bad that has occurred in my life has been predictable and inevitable, especially the choices and actions that have made sure I am now utterly alone.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that's one reason. I don't mind working as a cleaning woman. It's just like reading a book.”
― Lucia Berlin