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Galápagos QUOTES

Galápagos QUOTES

1 " What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

2 " It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour.
A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

3 " That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about.' And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it--have slaves fight each other to death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

4 " As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

5 " Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

6 " I thought that was pretty good. So then I disturbed my father at his typewriter, and asked him what my heritage was from his side of the family. I didn’t know then what sperm was, and so wouldn’t understand his answer for several years. “My boy,” he said, “you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles—champions every one. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

7 " As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely “World War Three. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

8 " Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

9 " This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

10 " Poput tolikih patoloških ličnosti koje su prije milijun godina bile od moći, mogao je učiniti gotovo sve prepuštajući se trenutačnom porivu i ne osjećajući gotovo ništa. Logička objašnjenja za njegova djela, izmišljena u dokolici, uvijek su dolazila kasnije. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

11 " They needed lots of peace and quiet," said Roy, "and so do I, and so do you, I guess, and I'm sorry if I disturbed you. I wasn't doing anything a bird wouldn't do."
Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.
They don't make memories like that anymore. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

12 " So Roy's tears were understandable when he remembered tying animals to all those stakes. Such a cruel experiment had been performed on animals, of course, on sheep and pigs and cattle and horses and monkeys and ducks and chickens and geese, but surely not on a zoo such as Roy described. To hear him tell it, he had tethered peacocks and snow leopards and gorillas and crocodiles and albatrosses to the stakes. In his big brain, Bikini became the exact reverse of Noah's ark. Two of every sort of animal had been brought there in order to be atom-bombed. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

13 " Some automatic device clicked in her big brain, and her knees felt weak, and there was a chilly feeling in her stomach. She was in love with this man.

They don't make memories like that anymore "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

14 " For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

15 " Why so many of us knocked us major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were tring to give evolution a shove in the right direction - in the direction of smaller brains. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

16 " Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilogrammes! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.
So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

17 " Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

18 " I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

19 " That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.

Quoth Mandarax:

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos

20 " I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary,' he whispered, his eyes closed. 'Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Galápagos