8 quotes
The army is just too easy and too simple: fight to the death for the cause is just.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
Our parents saw each of us marrying, settling down, but certainly not with one another.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
I was thinking about what I said to you about customs and morals keeping people apart, making them different from one another. People are so much more alike than different. So much more.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
That’s the army. But our job was to make the rest of you think it was safe and glorious and good, too. Boys into men? Discipline that isn’t self-discipline doesn’t mean thing to a boy.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
“The aristocracy,” she repeated. “At its worst, a sargasso of every conceivable neurosis society may have; by naming itself it has agreed to its own death. But at least it has had the dignity to applaud its own order of execution in the past if the document is eloquent.”
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
They could all know now if they wanted, but they are too embarrassed. Rolth, for three thousand years everyone has tried to find a word to differentiate men from other animals; some of the ancients called him the laughing animal, some the moral animal. Well, I wonder if he isn’t the embarrassed animal.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
You see, the poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damage.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
When what is is congruent to what is supposed the reaction is functional and the mental processes competent. When what is and what is supposed to have nothing to do with each other the choice of reactions is random. Something tears. Stay or run, laugh or frown: the decision is chance.
City of a Thousand Suns (1965)