Take a load off on a Friday afternoon and enjoy a few bits of humor and thoughtfulness from one of the best writers ever. If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, who just left this plane of existence, sadly for us, here’s a few quotes to give insight into his fabulous and wise mind.

“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.”

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

“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.”

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!”

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”

“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.” from “Cat’s Cradle”

The following are from “Cold Turkey”, In These Times, May 10, 2004:
“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.” from A Man without a Country

“Humor is an almost physiological response to fear.” also from A Man without a Country

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” from A Man without a Country

from “Breakfast of Champions”:
“I can have oodles of charm when I want to.”

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

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

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.” from Cat’s Cradle

“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.” from Cold Turkey

“Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” from Mother Night

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.” from ‘Hocus Pocus’ 1990

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” from Sirens of Titan

And from Slaughterhouse Five (read this book!)
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

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

Here’s another site about the man we will all miss.

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