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1 " Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. "
― , Breakfast of Champions
2 " And I think now, as my fiftieth birthday draws near, about the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was only thirty-eight years old when he died. He got a lot of help in organizing his novels from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. I have heard that Perkins told him to keep in mind as he wrote, as a unifying idea, a hero’s search for a father. It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn’t be embarrassing. It’s simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn’t feel particularly good if I found another father. "
3 " The thing was: Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, "Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time. "
4 " That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of," he told the bird. "You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for- to get out of the cage. "
5 " He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. "Hate to do this, Bill," he said of the fungi he was murdering. "Fungi have as much right to life asI do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore. "
6 " Don't matter if you care," the old miner said, "if you don't own what you care about. "
7 " Kago did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by ideas as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was {is} no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth. "
8 " life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly "
9 " human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth. "
10 " I thought Karabekean with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid "
