Simon

“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.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm 'i th' bud, feed on her damask cheek. She pinned in thought; and, with a green and yellow melancholy, she sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? We men may say more, swear more; but indeed our shows are more than will; for we still prove much in our vows but little in our love.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from
under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to
make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his
local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people
caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the
people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop"
or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they
wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole
in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put
a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy
put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report
card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity,
which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the
difference between right and wrong.
· Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly
famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to
someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew
the airplane to someplace else.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five