The big show is inside my head.

Rabo Karabekian: I'm in the middle of a sentence. Circe Berman: Who isn't?.

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?