I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

The complicated futility of ignorance.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?