81
" Inside, Harrison came face to face with
a small man wearing immense plus fours.
“Looking for someone?” asked the small man.
“Yes, the fire chief.”
“Who’s he?”
By now prepared for this sort of thing, Harrison
spoke as one would to a child. “See here, Mister, this
is a fire-fighting outfit. Somebody bosses it. Somebody
organizes the whole affair, fills forms, presses
buttons, shouts orders, recommends promotions,
kicks the shiftless, grabs all the credit, transfers all
the blame and generally lords it around. He’s the
most important man in the bunch and everybody
knows it.” His forefinger tapped imperatively on the
other’s chest. “And he is the fellow I’m going to talk
to if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Nobody is more important than anyone else.
How can he be? I think you’re crazy.”
“You’re welcome to think what you please but I
am telling you that—.”
A shrill bell clamoured, cutting off his sentence. "
― Eric Frank Russell , The Great Explosion
85
" Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope. "
― George Carlin
93
" Don’t be so hard on yourself, You’re doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - The one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn’t understand. Most of us don’t live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we’re a whole bunch of selves. When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different faces we wear throughout our lives. You’re just hating the selves you’ve always hated, and loving the ones you’ve always loved. It’s bound to mess you up. "
― Christopher Moore , A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1)
100
" It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. "
― Ted Hughes , Poetry in the Making: An Anthology