Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
Interpretation
The quote highlights human nature's tendency to look back at the past, even when warned against it.
Kurt Vonnegut reflects on the story of Lot's wife who was instructed not to look back at the destruction of her home, yet she did so, an act that he admires as fundamentally human. This act of looking back is a metaphor for how we all struggle with our pasts and the emotional pull they hold over us, acknowledging that it is a human characteristic to feel nostalgia or regret despite the consequences.
In practice
In a discussion about resilience and moving forward after loss.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
God's highest desire is not to make us rich, successful or popular. His goal is to make us His
Represent to yourself a dark city all burning and stinking with fire and brimstone. The damned are in the depth of hell within this woful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments in all their senses and members. Consider above all the eternity of their pains, which above all things makes hell intolerable.
When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.
His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
I well remember it being said to me by an occultist of great experience that two things are necessary for safety in occultism, right motives and right associates.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.