Nightly Quotes (page 113)
-
-
-
I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Crade, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat’s Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five...
Kurt Vonnegut
Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under the clouds, under that vast diffusion of force, under that mysterious firmament of wings, of stars, of gulfs, having around him and beneath him the ocean above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave...
Victor Hugo
Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”7
Schaffer, Ronald (1988-09-29). Wings of Judgment : American Bombing in World War II (p. 152). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Curtis LeMay
Life is maybe like deep-sea fishing. We wake up in the morning, we cast our nets into the water, an, if we are lucky, at day's end we will have netted one-- maybe two-- small fish. Occasionally we will net a seahorse or sometimes a shark-- or a life preserver or an iceberg, or a monster. And in our dreams at night we assess our Catch of the Day-- the treasures of this long, slow process of accumulation...
Doug Coupland
He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might somehow have already halved the distance to death. That the transition for him could not be so great for the world was already at some certain distance and if it were not death's terrain he encroached upon in his darkness then whose?
Cormac McCarthy
We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.
Mark Twain