wit

The pipe went out a long time ago and the officer (or whatever he is) is not even pretending to worry about getting it relit. It is there just to give him something to bite down on, which he does as vigorously as a civil war infantryman having a leg sawed off.

Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn't handle issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things.

"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person's language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat.

"Shit!" he says. "What's wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.

Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard, or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown.

LIKE A CLIENT OF ONE OF YOUR LESS REPUTABLE pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

"Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize." "Well, I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."

White said. In fact, he had a theory you could correlate the nation's decline with the growing adversity of these younger generations to a few cold ones.

There were more rituals, as they headed out of the building towards the bus that would take them to the pad. There was a card game called Possum's Fargo that they had to play, for instance, with a couple of the techs. Rosenberg couldn't believe his eves. Here they were, the five of them, like huge insects in their glaring orange pressure suits, standing around a table to play what seemed like, to him, a kid's version of poker. But—rigid tradition had it—they couldn't leave, until the commander, Angel, in this case, had lost a hand. It took six hands.

Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy.

"The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?'" the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?'"

We feel so superior to the dead. For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why'd he die?

"I'm sorry. I've got a nasty tongue. I never mean it when I say nasty things." "I know it," Cohn said. "You're really about the best friend I have, Jake." God help you, I thought.

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story.

"Direct action," said Bill. "It beats legislation."

Next morning I tipped everyone a little too much at the hotel to make more friends, and left on the morning train for San Sebastian. At the station I did not tip the porter more than I should because I did not think I would ever see him again. I only wanted a few good French friends in Bayonne to make me welcome in case I should come back there again. I knew that if they remembered me their friendship would be loyal.

There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.

John Milton threw open whole new vistas filled with charming, inexhaustible possibilities that promised to ward off monotony forever. Major Major went back to Washington Irving when John Milton grew monotonous.

You know, that might be the answer-to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."

the beautiful rich countess and her beautiful rich daughter-in-law, both of whom would never let him touch them or even flirt with them. They doted kittenishly on Nately and deferred passively to Aarfy, but they thought Yossarian was crazy and recoiled from him with distasteful contempt each time he made an indecent proposal or tried to fondle them when they passed on the stairs.

Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father's shoulder, said: "It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice." "Fuck Jesse James," Ed grumped. "Ed!" Trish cried. "Sorry," he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.

Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn't just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you'd cross the street to step in dogshit. God

He finished with a snappy salute at the building he thought might be the Bennington courthouse, then turned around, thinking the best way to start another year of independence in the good old U.S. of A. would be with a good old all-American fuck.

"Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that's not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees."

"It's an article on your hero, Donald Trump." McDermott grins.

Outside, smoking a cigar, contemplating the sky, I spot Reed Thompson, who emerges from the Puck Building with his entourage—Jamie Conway, Kevin Wynn, Marcus Halberstam, no babes—and invites me along to dinner; and though I suspect they have drugs, I have misgivings about spending the evening with them and decide not to trek up to that Salvadorian bistro, especially since they don't have reservations and aren't guaranteed a table.

At the sushi restaurant tonight McDermott, in a state of total frustration, asked the girls if they knew the names of any of the nine planets. Libby and Caron guessed the moon. Daisy wasn't sure but she actually guessed … Comet. Daisy thought that Comet was a planet. Dumbfounded, McDermott, Taylor and I all assured her that it was.

So we wouldn't run out of things to talk about over lunch, I tried to read a trendy new short-story collection called Wok that I bought at Barnes & Noble last night and whose young author was recently profiled in the Fast Track section of New York magazine, but every story started off with the line "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" and I had to put this slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort.

I also mention, after pouring them another drink, that I went to Harvard, and then I ask, after a pause, "Ever hear of it?"

I look up, admiringly, at Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight.

"But don't you find it boring to wear only two colors?" "Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing," Malcolm said. "I don't want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports."

The firms were all designing teaser campaigns, nothing specific, and they were unhappy. Creative people needed nurturing. They needed encouragement to do their best work. He couldn't waste his time taking scientists on tours.

Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter.

I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language.

As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real morals. Commit all the crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by-and-by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.

now mainstream economists everywhere were fearful that this sudden flood of new currency was going to cause massive deflation. Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip.

it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed.

"These friends of yours are ships." "Yes," Chamlis said. "Both of them." "What are they called?" "The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read the Instructions." "They're not warships?" "With names like that? They're GCUs; what else?"

"Remind me," Jubal told her, "to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers. Title is 'Gossip Unlimited'—no, make that 'Gossip Gone Wild.' "

"Customs, morals—is there a difference? Woman, here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe—and you want to turn him into a copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why not go whole hog? Get him a briefcase."

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

"These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith."

I heard a rumor about painted women and came out to investigate. One of them is dressed in leopard loungewear under her coat. She showed me. Another one says she has a snap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried, though, about all these outbreaks of life-style diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus."

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting—the virility of fires, one might say—suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.

He's the only dog I ever knew who preferred plaudits to provender.

"Your father isn't a member of Congress, is he?" I murmured. "My father was two cc's of white fluid in a test tube." "The best kind."

They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man's judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar.

"A month isn't anything for Cape Stiff," he said grimly. "I've been off here seven weeks and then turned tail and run around the other way." "Around the world?" I gasped. "It was the only way to get to 'Frisco," he answered.

How sailors, after having once experienced the Horn, can ever sign on again for a voyage around is beyond me. It but serves to show how stupid they must be.

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

How would I ever have got through life without women to act as my interpreters?

The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.

Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them. Pretend you're engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without pretending you have the slightest idea what's going on.

"Oh, god, please don't read the Wikipedia entry," Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified. "I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage," said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value. "But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don't have to consult an online source."

"As an undergraduate in your last week," Solly said, "this is the last time in your life you'll be able to get away with being presumptuous. I recommend you make the most of it."

VLADIMIR: Where are your boots? ESTRAGON: I must have thrown them away. VLADIMIR: When? ESTRAGON: I don't know. VLADIMIR: Why? ESTRAGON: [exasperated] I don't know why I don't know!

"Those high-priced designers work according to ancient laws," she told him. "They all work more or less together—though they don't plan it that way. I've decided that trite ideas are born simultaneously in mediocre minds. A fashion designer or a television writer or a studio executive cannot really be said to possess a mind at all. They're hive mentalities; they eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea—all at once. The turds look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies. The key to dressing is to look at what everyone else is wearing then avoid it. Find a creative person who had never thought of designing clothes, and ask her to come up with something."

"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?"

Making the right decision is, priority-wise, down there along with getting enough niacin and writing a thank-you letter to grandma for the nice pearl earrings.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr. Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully sensible of that gentleman's merits under arid conditions, as when something moist was going.

if you're sitting on top of those damn unstoppable Solid Rocket Boosters, it's not a question of if you go, just which direction.

There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.

"As the crew had predicted," said Rumfoord, "the lieutenant-colonel was spoiled forever as a soldier. He became hopelessly engrossed in the intricate tactics of causing less rather than more pain. Proof of his success would be his winning of the woman's forgiveness and understanding.

Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren't like that.

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, "Madam, I cannot conceive.")

If I die of TB, it will be because my body could not build prisons fast enough and strong enough. Is there a lesson there? Not a cheerful one.

JUST BECAUSE SOME of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. THE END

"Statistically, that is not a valid—" "These people do not look like statisticians." "Politics." Doob sighed. Luisa chuckled. "I hear you, sugar. I'm not gonna say you're wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—'politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization."

There was another story for Walter. Shoes. If Lunarians wear them, they tend to be the soft kind, like moccasins, or socks. Reason: in a crowded urban environment of perfectly smooth floors and carpets and a majority of barefoot people, hard shoes are anti-social. You could break someone else's toes. Once I had my feet jammed into the smelly things I had to search for the buttonhook. Buttons, on shoes! It was outrageous. How had people ever tolerated such things? To add insult to inutility, the damn things had cost me a fortune.

"It's a selective retirement," Richard explained, "a retirement from boring shit." "I think that's called a promotion."

In a natty beige linen suit, her husband, the Prince Consort, whose name, lamentably, was Joe.

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

An alligator was swimming up to look her over. She swung at it with her fist, nearly losing her balance. "Get out of here, you slimy lizard!" she screamed. The reptile recalled urgent business on the other side of the swamp, and hurried out of her way.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.

I command you, as your superior officer: Stand up!" "Anything else you would like?" asks Tjaden. "Will you obey my order or not?" Tjaden replies, without knowing it, in the well-known classical phrase. At the same time he ventilates his backside. "I'll have you court-martialled," storms Himmelstoss.

This felt so good that it triggered a few moments of Puritanical self-examination. Anything that felt so good might be a trick of the devil.

"If these de-growth people want to reduce population, they should volunteer to be first."

The hardest part about working with aliens and saving humanity from extinction is constantly having to come up with names for stuff.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The clerks tried to sell her face paint, a holomist suit, dildopants, and a live mink coat, so she paid and left. She wasn't used to pressure selling, and didn't like it.

"You haven't seen a party till you get a group of Anglicans and Catholics trying to beat each other to the bottom of a bottle."

faith was generally for people who were bad at math.

If there was a hell, it was in sales.

Although, when you think about it, Goldilocks was a bit of a dimwitted bee-atch. Who falls asleep in a house owned by bears?