August

“Do you know how long a year takes when it's going away?' Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. 'This long.' He snapped his fingers. 'A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you're an old man.'

'Old?' asked Clevinger with surprise. 'What are you talking about?'

'Old.'

'I'm not old.'

'You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow down?' Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

'Well, maybe it is true,' Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. 'Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?'

'I do,' Dunbar told him.

'Why?' Clevinger asked.

'What else is there?”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.
"And Father started giggling," Castle continued.
"He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?" asked Castle.
"Nope."
"'Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will
all be yours.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle

“It takes brains not to make money," Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. "Any tool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money."
"T. S. Eliot," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the telephone without identifying himself.
Colonel Cargill, in Rome, was perplexed.
"Who was it?" asked General Peckem.
"I don't know," Colonel Cargill replied.
"What did he want?"
"I don't know."
"Well, what did he say?"
"T. S. Eliot," Colonel Cargill informed him.
"What's that?"
"T. S. Eliot," Colonel Cargill repeated.
"Just 'T. S.-'"
"Yes, sir. That's all he said. Just 'T. S. Eliot.—""
"I wonder what it means," General Peckem reflected.
Colonel Cargill wondered, too.
"T. S. Eliot," General Peckem mused.
"T. S. Eliot," Colonel Cargill echoed with the same funereal puzzlement.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Will this bother you as a scientist," I inquired, "to go through a ritual like this?"
"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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle