The world is a little less clever since Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I survived high school on a steady diet of his semi-science-fiction. I don’t know what I would have done without him – I might have been a duller and and more intellectually inhibited person if not for Breakfast of Champions (the first one I read, it got me hooked).
Fortunately his legacy is dozens of wonderful books that can continue to inspire and amuse future generations to come.
Some good quotations for safekeeping:
“Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt”
“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.”
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My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”
Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
From excerpt from A Man Without a Country (recent political writing). The whole thing is completely amazing. Read it.
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“So it goes.”
Add your favorites…
From the lyrics he wrote for a humanist version of Mozart’s Requiem (which can be found in ‘Fates Worse than Death’):
“Rest eternal grant them, O Cosmos, and let not light disturb their sleep.”
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde, neve lux somnum peterbet eorum.”