August

“I laughed.
"Something's funny?"
"Pay no attention to when I laugh," I begged him. "I'm a notorious pervert in that respect.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“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

“I go to visit Ari in Ichilov hospital and wander from room to room with a bouquet of flowers trying to find him, but all the rooms are occupied by bald women who look like my mother, even though my mother actually died of a heart attack. When I go to the reception desk to ask where Ari is, the nurse checks the computer and tells me that he's in Tel Hashomer hospital. How can you not know where your husband's best friend is hospitalized? she scolds me and takes the flowers from me as if I had failed an exam and now all was lost. I drive to Tel Hashomer, and I even have the number of his room, twelve, but when I go inside, it's my husband lying in the bed, hooked up to an IV, his eyes closed, and Ari is sitting at his bedside saying to me: I'm sorry, you arrived too late. I cry hysterically in the dream, not understanding how they had managed to hide the truth from me all that time.”
― Eshkol Nevo, L'ultima intervista