muse exchange (making sure we laugh)

Arianna paints portraits of me. I take pictures of her. We’re helping each other in our nudity.

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Joseph Heller and paradox: a few more quotes

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.

“Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”
Clevinger was dead. That was the basic flaw in his philosophy.

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

Rise above principal and do what’s right.

The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.

The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.

You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril: he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Joseph Heller, Catch 22

I do know that girls in their early twenties are easy and sweet. (Girls in their late twenties are easier but sad, and that isn’t so sweet.) They are easy, I think, because they are sweet, and they are sweet, I think, because they are dumb. (LOOOOLL)

I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it.

The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.

No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don’t know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die.

If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won’t find anything to beat it, and you won’t know if it will come to you once more.
Joseph Heller, God Knows

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A few Kurt Vonnegut quotes to be handed down to posterity.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
Breakfast of Champions

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Slaughterhouse Five

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can’t stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy.

About astrology and palmistry: They are good because they make people feel vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

If you can do no good, at least do no harm.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.

Is it possible that seemingly incredible geniuses like Bach and Shakespeare and Einstein were not in fact superhuman, but simply plagiarists, copying great stuff from the future?

Vietnam only made billionaires out of millionaires. Iraq is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

If I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

There is no good reason good can’t triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled.

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