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"Ignorance had always been a defining feature of the privileged."

“Something about how living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink. Letting go of them in the water, you know."

“I think, that the thing about losing someone isn't the loss but the absence of afterward.”

“When something bad is actually happening, it's easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn't real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.”

“It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one's personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over.”

“It's easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.”

“I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did.”

“Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud.”

“If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.”

“The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the
world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas cham-bers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution.”

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

“Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile and nod.”

—> cont.
“And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lo-renzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”

"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.”

“And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Boko-non, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, ‘What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?’
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it:
‘Nothing.’l

“So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason.”

“Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.”

"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."

“Americans… are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”

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

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."

"Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
- The Books of Bokonon. I:5

*harmless untruths

"I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left."

“Together, they were quiet, skulls listing towards one another. Even in death, they craved touch.”

“Being a mama is a promise to try your best… But you didn’t try.”

"I wish you knew how hard it is to be a mama. It's the hardest thing in the whole world. It's a promise you make to be perfect and make no mistakes. And to put yourself second until you die. It mutates into this horrible burden. A weight you have to carry forever."

"I wondered if this was what being a real human was: accepting you were pieces of other people too. The people you loved and the people you hurt."

"I was a changeling, like the boys from school and the other children, constantly shifting while our parents wanted us, so badly, to stay frozen."

"Laughter and love came in abundance but it spoilt them."

"A foetus in a belly couldn't be selfish. But a human child could be. To Eden, the potential of who I'd become was so much more beautiful than the way I spoke back."