Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie! " He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait."I was already waiting. What else was there to do?" Here you are, " he said. "Look! What's this?" At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream, " he said. He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I'd seen in Stubbs's eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that. Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn't I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin's brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He'd worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store. .Jonathan Coe
About This Quote
The American author and essayist Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" is a classic science fiction novel. In the novel, an alien race called Tralfamadore abducts Billy Pilgrim at the age of ten from the Earth. The aliens then send Billy to a planet called Tralfamadore, which is a place where all of history is compressed into one day. In the course of this day, Billy witnesses a lot of interesting things as he jumps back and forth through time.
One of the most memorable things that Billy sees is a newspaper report about a fire in a slaughterhouse on Earth. Billy Pilgrim has been captured by aliens and transported to a planet called Tralfamadore, where all of history is compressed into one day. On this day he witnesses a lot of interesting things as he jumps back and forth through time. One of the most memorable things that he sees is a newspaper report of a fire in a slaughterhouse on Earth that took place many years ago. The reporter explains that this fire was the cause of great sorrow and tragedy on Earth, but also had far-reaching effects for humanity as we know it today: The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Source: The Rotters Club
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- Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie! " He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait."I was already waiting....
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