forlorn (iodine) wrote in excerpts, @ 2004-07-26 14:16:00

Current mood:

accomplished

The Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut is a genius. I just finished reading The Sirens of Titan, and as I was reading I made sure to highlight some of the lines that I thought were especially brilliant. The following are a few quotes I liked from the book:
"I, your Lord God on High want things restrained from you, so you will quit thinking about crazy towers and rockets to Heaven, and start thinking about how to be better neighbors and husbands and wives and daughters and sons! Don't look to your rockets for salvation-- look to your homes and churches!"

"nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he?... You might just learn something when you're in the mood to learn something. The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why."

"At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn't ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to. They said that not just Unk but everyone had an antenna like that--doctors and nurses and four-star generals included. It was a very democtatic army, they said."

"I WAS A VICTIM OF A SERIES OF
ACCIDENTS, AS ARE WE ALL."

And finally, an excerpt from Dead-eye Dick, another one of my favorite Vonnegut novels:

"To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that. They never shut up.”