It is undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he should be able to say more than he thinks
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When and Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinkgs is that the dead person is in a bad condition in a particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
—
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences… but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I suppose you think I’m very brazen. Or très fou. Or something.’
Not at all.’
She seemed disappointed. ‘Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don’t mind. It’s useful.
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
