“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before ... He is full of muderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.” (Cat’s Cradle)
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
“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.” (Cat's Cradle)
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” (Cat's Cradle)
“Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush
“There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.” (Sirens of Titan)
“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.” (Cat's Cradle)
“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” (Slaughterhouse-Five)
“I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.” (Cat's Cradle)
I'm asking everyone I can think of, but does anyone have a copy of Cat's Cradle handy where they could look up the bit describing the soulmate couple that John meets on the plane to San Lorenzo? That's seriously my favorite description of love, anyplace, ever.
4 comments:
"Horlick Minton, the New American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire...They were lovebirds. They entertained each other with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed only of two persons."
Got it off the Web!! I ROCK in the use of the Web, no? Even if I do, at times, resort to the contents of gift shops to give my life meaning.
Glad you had such a great time in the mountains. My first experience of real religious feeling was in the mountains, as an eight-year-old at Camp Fire Girl camp. The sensory overload (piney smell, waterfall noise, wet grass, wild mountain skyline, food cooked outdoors by me) made something explode (or get born) inside me that I had had no idea was there before. Tolkien did it again for me. But so does any time I'm out in the real wild. There was a moment on an Amazon tributary with Oma that did it again to me that I was just remembering a few days ago -- a backwater lake full of different kinds of white herons and black cormorants, all flying, swimming and nesting in the leafless trees poking out of the water. The sky was an unusual deep blue. We wandered through these huge convocations of birds in a little boat and they didn't even notice. There were a lot more of them than there were of us. Wow.
Better get back to grading papers.
Love,
Mom
That’s it! Thanks Mom! You DO rock. I had forgotten the term duprass. I just searched for that, and found a few more bits:
“A true duprass can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.”
And from some site that talks about terms within Bokononism, like duprass:
“They're rare. It could be Vonnegut saying, look here, yes, here's true love. Of the self-sufficient, self-absorbed kind. It happens occasionally, you may see it, but don't expect it. For the rest of us, let's thumb our noses at the gods, and love as well as we can.”
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.” (Cat's Cradle)
-That one struck me powerfully, too. Vivid, pointed way to make an excellent observation.
I know you seemed surprised when I added Vonnegut among the great literary worthies whose material would be priceless for a class on human sexuality and relationships (addressing the deeply spiritual--as I've said, why *not* at BYU?)...but can you imagine how valuable discussions on a durpass would be for greater light and knowledge on the subject? :) As priceless as Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" one of my favorite descriptions.
thank you so much for sharing those. i love, love, love them.
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