March 28, 2024 Breaking News, Latest News, and Videos

KURT VONNEGUT:

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.

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it

goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is

preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. . . He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use

semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

What the Gospels actually said was: don’t kill anyone until you are absolutely sure they aren’t well connected.

The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

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