Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut

• “After we finished hanging Hoess,” Mengel said to me, “I packed up my clothes to go home. The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice within an hour I did the very same job—once to Hoess and once to my suitcase. Both jobs felt about the same.”

• I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child’s cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, and those still hiding, that it was time to go home. The cry was this: “Olly-olly-ox-in-free.” And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and seek with a sweet and mournful—“Olly-olly-oxen-free.”

• And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her. “There—“ she said, “that’s what we’ll look like when we’re dead.”

• It was going to be about the love my wife and I had for each other. It was going to show how a pair of lovers in a world gone mad could survive by being loyal only to a nation composed of themselves—a nation of two.

• (About Nazis) They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well as people, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause. Too hard. Amen. Too hard.

• “If you imagine that I’m going home to think it over,” I said, “you’re mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I’m not a soldier, not a political man. I’m an artist. If war comes, it’ll find me still working at my peaceful trade.”

• And I did fool everybody, I began to strut like Hitler’s right-hand man, and nobody saw the honest me I hid so deep inside.

• Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains. And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was! What a map I could draw from a tourist a micron high, a submicroscopic Wandervogel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. (…) Oh how we clung, my Helga and I how—mindlessly we clung!

• Only one thing counted—The Nation of two. And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.

• I was tempted take the morphine reflecting that, if it made me feel happy, I would, after all, have enough money to support the habit. But then I understood that I was already drugged. I was feeling no pain. My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was my ability to let my emotions be stirred by only on thing—my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

• We once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, as a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.

• “You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”

• “We all cling to something,” I said. “To the wrong things—“ he said, “and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe(…) All people are insane(…) They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

• It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.

• People should be changed by world wars, else what are world wars for?

• “And then I discovered something I had never known before—what a true friend was,” he said. “I throw my lot in with you gladly, friend. Nothing else interests me. Nothing else attracts me in the least. With your permission, my paints and I would like nothing better than to go with you wherever Fate taxes you next.” “This—this is friendship indeed,” I said. “I hope so,” he said.

• I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

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

• “Three people in all the world knew me for what I was—“ I said. “And all the rest—“ I shrugged. “They knew you for what you were, too,” he said abruptly.

• “Tell me what to live for—anything at all,” she said beseechingly. “It doesn’t have to be love. Anything at all!” She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world’s being a junk shop. “I’ll life for that chair that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, an I will! … Just tell me what it should be!... Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive too!”

• Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself—will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There were teeth missing, God knows—some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history—gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.” Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself! There’s life in the old boy yet! And, where there’s life—There is life.

• "We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."
  "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you."
  
  
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