Quotes from book

Grass

“If God is truly powerful, He would not let this plague go on.”

“Rich people didn’t get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity.”

“The first thing you’ve got to do is tell yourself that the shitheads are wrong…Not just a little bit wrong, but irremediably, absolutely, and endemically wrong. Nothing you can say or do will stop their being wrong. They’re damned to eternal wrongness, and that’s God’s will.”

“She was trying to feel philosophical about dying, not managing it, trying not to be frightened, and not managing that, either.”

“All men believed they had their own magics in bed.”

“To Sylvan truth was truth and all else was black heresy, though on occasion he had the very human difficulty of deciding which was which.”

“History upon Terra tells us what horrors follow upon religious mandates of unlimited reproduction.”

“They see things; they overhear things; they tell us. We put two and two together to make forty-four, when we must.”

““Not hunting today, sir?” asked Tony in his most innocent voice, busy putting two and two together but not sure how he felt about the resultant sum.”

“All kids think some other family is perfect.”

“I’m trying to decide whether we can afford to be merciful. The Arbai were merciful, but when confronted with evil, mercy becomes an evil.”

“Don’t waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better!”

“Eugenie thought of this often. Men had told her many sweet things about herself, but never before that she was important. It was the nicest compliment she had ever received.”

“Too good is good for nothing.”

“Marjorie thought: It always comes down to something like this, doesn’t it. No matter what our consciences say, no matter how much doctrine we’ve been taught, no matter how many ethical considerations we’ve chewed and swallowed and tried to digest, it always comes down to us arming ourselves with weapons as deadly as we can manage and going out into combat…”

“They haven’t learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all.”

“They’ve got a kind of committee there,” he had said, “an office. Acceptable Doctrine, it’s called. Everyone on the committee is mostly concerned about what people believe. They’re running things, too; don’t let them tell you they aren’t. Truth doesn’t enter in. If they’ve decided something is doctrine, they’ll ignore all evidence to the contrary and lie to your face. You don’t want to run afoul of those types, do you? Not if you have questions to ask. No.”

“Useless as a third leg on a goose.”

““I don’t have much confidence,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been taught isn’t making sense.”
“That’s the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn’t fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow.””