His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.
He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.
He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.
You hate America, don’t you? she said. That would be as silly as loving it, I said. It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great fla...
What a fool I would have been to let self-respect interfere with my happiness!
Well finish your story anyway.Where was I?The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do...
We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long, she said in English. I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that.My life is nothing but room for you. I said. It...
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each...
To be is to do’ — Socrates.‘To do is to be’ — Jean-Paul Sartre.‘Do be do be do’ — Frank Sinatra.
There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason to ever hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man t...
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Bec...
God made mud.God got lonesome.So God said to some of the mud, Sit up!See all I've made, said God, the hills, the sea, thesky, the stars.And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and lookaround.Luck...
Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn’t paid much attention to it.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
Young Castle called me Scoop. Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?I might ask the same of you, I replied.I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally come...