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61 " This library is full of stories of supposed triumphs, which makes me very suspicious of it. It’s misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse. *** "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Hocus Pocus
62 " I AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller institution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament. "
63 " The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them. "
64 " I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan, when this offer to me of an appointment to the United States Military Academy came out of the blue. The offer arrived at a low point in my father’s life, when he needed something to boast about which would impress our simple-minded neighbors. They would think an appointment to West Point was a great prize, like being picked for a professional baseball team. "
65 " SHE TOLD THE TRUSTEES, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people's becoming slaves in their own country.This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.He was told that of course there were.In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn't want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel. "
66 " Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess. "
67 " Cadets at West Point did not make music. The musicians in the dance band and the marching band were Regular Army enlisted men, members of the servant class.They were under orders to play music as written, note for note, and never mind how they felt about the music or about anything. "
68 " profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you. "
69 " But the tape began right after that, with my saying, as though out of the blue, and as a joke, of course, only it didn't sound like a joke during the playback, that, in effect, the whole World was for sale to anyone who had Yen or was willing to perform fellatio. "
70 " Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce. "
71 " Sana âşık olacak kadar aptal bir kadına ne denir, biliyor musun?" dedi. Gözlerini Musket Dağı'na dikmişti."Hayır," dedim.O da şöyle karşılık verdi: "Vietnam'a hoşgeldin. "
72 " If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy. "
73 " No combination of Time and Luck could have produced a camera that excellent, not even if the quantity of time had been 1,000,000,000,000 years! How is that for an unsolved mystery? "
74 " What kind of an animal would do such a thing? The old me, I think. *** "
75 " Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much. "
76 " When you dare to think about how huge the illegal drug business is in this country, you have to suspect that practically everybody has a steady buzz on, "