I visit my assistant mistress. "Well, Azalea, " I say, sitting in the best chair, "what has happened to you since my last visit?" Azalea tells me what happened to her. She has covered a sofa, and written a novel. Jack has behaved badly. Roger has lost his job (replaced by an electric eye). Gigi's children are in the hospital being detoxified, all three. Azalea herself is dying of love. I stroke her buttocks, which are perfection, if you can have perfection, under the capitalistic system. "It is better to marry that to burn, " St. Paul says, but St. Paul is largely discredited now, for the toughness of his views does not accord with the experience of advanced industrial societies. Donald Barthelme
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal,... - Karl Marx
  2. If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then... - Herbert Marcuse
  3. Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Within fashionable good, there's formal and then... - Haruki Murakami
  4. The justification of capitalism is not that the economy grows faster than it grows under any other system. . not that the goods pour forth. The justification of capitalism is that it is the only economic system consistent with the requirements of man's rational nature,... - M. Northrup Buechner
  5. What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate... - Inga Muscio
More Quotes By Donald Barthelme
  1. See the moon? It hates us.
  2. The death of God left the angels in a strange position.
  3. --Why are we fighting them?-- They're mad. We're sane.-- How do we know?-- That we're sane?-- Yes.-- Am I sane?-- To all appearances.-- And you, do you consider yourself sane?-- I do.-- Well, there you have it.-- But don't they also consider themselves sane?-- I...
  4. We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing." "What is the interesting thing?" "The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced...
  5. New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Shipping and distribution have been improved...
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