“It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.”

“Fraugh!” cried the sleeper, as though he suddenly understood all.“Braugh!” he cried, not liking at all what he suddenly understood.“Sup-foe!” he said, saying in no uncertain terms what he was going to do about it.“Floof!” he cried.”

“And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?”

“There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.Look at it go!”

“I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.”

“What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.”

“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.”