“Ode To the BacillusOh powerful bacillusWith wonder how you fill us, Everyday.While medical detectives,With powerful objectives, Watch your play.”

“The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.”

“Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else’s feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own little hole almost to the end, the fool. But I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows. I can be eight lame women with falsies, eight cracked chamber pots, or -- let’s get right to the point -- a gladiator who is actually constructed of old clothes, brooms, and a paper plate with a face daubed on in finger-paints, not to mention two vagrants inside each shirt-sleeve and pant-leg, moving Goliath’s limbs at my say-so; but as long as you believe in the gladiator, you are whipped, and the Museum people will set out on your track, and then once they catch you, don’t think I won’t come study your exhibit until I can convince your own sweetheart that I am you come back from the dead. For I am Big George, the eternal winner.”

“I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.”

“So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all— Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL!”

“So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?”

“But how could he explain anything to them, when they understood good but not goodness, strong but not strength, black but not blackness? Give us bread! the Savages cried. Heal us!They were frightened by the consecrated wine, believing that the Black-Gowns drank human blood. This is the blood of JESUS, said Pere Masse. Was that a man? they asked.He was the SON OF GOD, but He became a man to die for us. In memory of his sacrifice, we drink His blood. At this they drew back and whispered in their language, with many terrified glances. ”