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From “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood #TheBlindAssassin#MargaretAtwood#Apocalypse#Death#EndOfTheWorld#BookQuotes@margaretatwood.bsky.social

But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we've had enough of it we turn it off. So much for the twentieth century, we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there's a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twenty-first century, sweeping overhead like a spaceship filled with ruthless lizard-eyed aliens or a metal pterodactyl. Sooner or later it will sniff us out, it will tear the roofs off our flimsy little burrows with its iron claws, and then we will be just as naked and shivering and starving and diseased and hopeless as the rest. Excuse this digression. At my age you indulge in these apocalyptic visions. You say, The end of the world is at hand. You
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…2/2 Extended Holiday Excerpt from “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut #BreakfastOfChampions#Vonnegut#Bookquotes#4thOfJuly

Breakfast of Champions of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this: Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines. • The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything. 11
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. * Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium ni-trate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily, so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were. • When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries
Breakfast of Champions the people, who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time-kicking and screaming, yelling for milk. In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. And so on. * Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Com-munism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to. So they didn't have to. * Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold onto it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn't get their hands on doodley-squat.
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1/2 Extended holiday excerpt from “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut #July4#IndependenceDay#America#KurtVonnegut

chapter 1 This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history. The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane. • Listen: Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. 7
E K OV lib and all SEen T take val lear exist deal DELAC Kurt Vonnegut, Ir. This was their national anthem, which was pure balder-dash, like so much they were expected to take seriously: O, say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thru the perilous fight Ơer the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? * There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks. Here is what their flag looked like: 众 8
Г- 1t to 0- Breakfast of Champions It was the law of their nation, a law no other nation on the planet had about its flag, which said this: "The flag shall not be dipped to any person or thing." Flag-dipping was a form of friendly and respectful sa-lute, which consisted of bringing the flag on a stick closer to the ground, then raising it up again. • The motto of Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: "E pluribus unum." The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren't for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, "In nonsense is strength." * A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless edu-cation, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the them. year in which sea
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From “Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick” by Jason Pargin @jasonkpargin.bsky.social#ZoeyAshe#Quotes#Bookquotes#power#psychopaths

Will cut her off. "Being against power is easy, Zoey, because you never, ever need to offer solutions or take risks. Exercising power in the right way is what's hard. This system favors psychopaths in the same way that basketball favors the tall.
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QFsagepassages.bsky.social

From “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin #kindness#UrsulaKLeGuin#quotes#Booksky#SciFi

There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warm-est. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
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