Home > Work > Peace in Amber (The World of Kurt Vonnegut)
1 " I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn't care how angry I got. It didn't fix a thing. "
― Hugh Howey , Peace in Amber (The World of Kurt Vonnegut)
2 " And so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and heart grow weary. "
3 " the fires are not urgent. They move at a crawl, and the gray smoke drifts lazily into the cloudless sky, and I can’t imagine that anyone is hurt. They will get away. They will get away. There are sirens coming, and this is just some thing to gawk at. "
4 " Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice. "
5 " I glance at my wristwatch. It has gotten so late that it is now September 11, and there I am standing in a patch of blue and empty sky. "
6 " I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments. "
7 " She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber. "
8 " Billy Pilgrim wasn't weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep—he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn't kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life. "
9 " We devolve into animals when we creep near to death. "
10 " I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up. "
11 " Montana Wildhack is screaming. All of us are. Twelve years later, I’m lying beside my dog in an otherwise empty house. She dreams and I cry. Thousands are dying all over again. So it goes. "
12 " Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes. "
13 " the boom. I hear it and I feel it. "
14 " The second jet, however, brought the promise of a third and a fourth. Here was a pattern. Jets are falling out of the sky. The world has gone amuck. A GPS malfunction, an EMP detonation, solar flares, a dozen disaster films, and science fiction plots. My brain is misfiring with all the possibilities but the real one. "
15 " A man asks if I’m leaving. People can hear the engines, can see the exhaust, are watching me scramble around the decks to make ready. “C’mon,” I tell the man. Others are looking at me expectantly. “Anyone who wants to go, c’mon,” I say. I have people to help. Somehow, this helps me. "
16 " There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building… So it goes. "
17 " It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Ft. Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel. "
18 " That hotshot pilot who buzzed the Hudson is forgotten. Here is something new. The boom and the smoke—these two things are unrelated in my mind. "
19 " the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper. "
20 " there is a man blocking our way. Sitting astride a tractor with a big scooping bucket on the front, he yells at us for being on his property. We explain the boats, and he says we can’t tie up there, that this is his restaurant. We say there’s no room anywhere, that the Coast Guard won’t let us leave, that they’ll shoot at us if we do. He tells us we better go fucking home and get our guns. He tells us we’re at war. "
