Just what kind of sin is involved

…they stop singing and interrupt each other playfully: 'It's going to be a hot, muggy day, with possible thunderstorms,' says the first, and the second chimes in, flirtatiously: 'Really?' And the first voice answers, equally flirtatiously: 'Mais oui. Pardon me, Bernard. But that's the way it is. We'll just have to put up with it.' Bernard laughs loudly and says: 'We are being punished for our sins.' And the first voice: 'Bernard, why should I have to suffer for your sins?' At that point Bernard laughs even harder, in order to make it clear to all listeners just what kind of sin is involved, and I understand him: this is the one deep yearning of our lives: to let everybody consider us great sinners! Let our vices be compared to thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes! When Frenchmen open their umbrellas later in the day, let them remember Bernard's ambiguous laugh with envy.

Milan Kundera - Immortality, 5

Vaguest mist of pain

The vaguest mist of pain, like lemon squeezed from a distant table, caused him to squint his eyes...

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers, 230

Honoured to be alive

I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honoured to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.

Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake, 157

This is the night, what it does to you

...Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Jack Kerouac - On The Road, 120

Unique

Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique...

Jesus probably designed his system so that it would fail in the hands of other men, that is the way with the greatest creators: they guarantee the desperate power of their own originality by projecting their system into an abrasive future.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers, 55

Maniacs in the fourth dimension

The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes or even imagine them.

One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimenson. So was William Blake, Rosewater's favourite artist. So were heaven and hell.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5, 75

Fairy lights

Those fairy lights were on, but for the record there was no-one home.

Dark Star - Graceadelica

Spanish mysteries

Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the colour of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the colour of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out of the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

Jack Kerouac - On The Road, 77

Filthy flamingo

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5, 24

I feel and think much as you do

I have taught creative writing during my seventy-three years on automatic pilot, rerun or not. I did it first at the University of Iowa in 1965. After that came Harvard, and then the City College of New York. I don't do it anymore.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."

Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake, 193

Shrieking mercury

...like the shriek between two approaching puddles of mercury, like the atmosphere of secrets which twin children exude.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers, 154

Night spilled like gasoline

But at night! Night spilled like gasoline on my most hopeless dreams.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers, 187

Mysterious

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein

Every effort shall be made

In chapter 45, I proposed two amendments to the Constitution. Here are two more, little enough to expect from life, one would think, like the Bill of Rights:

Article XXX: Every person, upon reaching a statutory age of puberty, shall be declared an adult in a solemn public ritual, during which he or she must welcome his or her new responsibilities in the community, and their attendant dignities.

Article XXXI: Every effort shall be made to make every person feel that he or she will be sorely missed when he or she is gone.

Such essential elements in an ideal diet for a human spirit, of course, can be provided convincingly only by extended families.

Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake, 175

This vital dimension didn't exist

But I knew I was coming to a point where I would have to make up my mind about Puerto Rico. I had been here three months and it seemed like three weeks. So far, there was nothing to get hold of, none of the real pros and cons I had found in other places. All the while I had been in San Juan I'd condemned it without really disliking it. I felt that sooner or later I would see that third dimension, that depth that makes a city real and that you never see until you've been there awhile. But the longer I stayed, the more I came to suspect that for the first time in my life I had come to a place where this vital dimension didn't exist or was too nebulous to make any difference. Maybe, God forbid, the place was what it appeared to be - a melange of Okies and thieves and bewildered jibaros.

Hunter S Thompson - The Rum Diary, 103

Tea rose

Her belly button was a tiny swirl, almost hidden. If all the breeze it took to ruffle a tea rose suddenly became flesh, it would be like her belly button.

Leonard Cohen - Beautiful Losers, 35