“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.”

“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.”

“Ah, God, what an ugly city Ilium is!'Ah, God,' says Bokonon, 'what an ugly city every city is!'Sleet was falling through a motionless blanket of smog. It was early morning. I was riding in the Lincoln sedan of Dr. Asa Breed. I was vaguely ill, still a little drunk from the night before. Dr. Breed was driving. Tracks of a long-abandoned trolley system kept catching the wheels of his car.Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra.My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.”

“I will say that I still can't get over how women are shaped, and that I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs.”

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

“Terry Kitchen asked me one time why, since I had so few gifts as a husband and father, I had gotten married. And I heard myself say: "That's the way the post-war movie goes.”

“Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren?Do I care?Doesn't everybody?Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!”