Bingo! I was hooked. I quickly...over the next couple years...got every book Vonnegut had written and read it. And I stayed current with Vonnegut over the following years as he wrote even more books.
Attending a panel discussion on "Vonnegut and Religion" at Christian Theological Seminary...and especially listening to Dan Wakefield reminisce about his friendship with Kurt...got me back in touch with why I liked Vonnegut's writing so well. And as to Vonnegut and religion...mostly Kurt referred to himself as an atheist...but I submit to you that his sermon "Palm Sunday," as written in his book, "Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage" (1981)...and preached in New York City at St. Clement's Episcopal Church in 1980...is one of the better sermons you will ever read.
At any rate, this blog-post is just an excuse to list some of the better (in my estimation) quotes from Vonnegut's writings. Let's start:
-We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
-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.
-True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
-Science is magic that works.
-That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
-Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.
-Until you die… it’s all life.
- 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.
- I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.'
-We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.
- Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
-I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'
-All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
-Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease.
-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.
-If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
-How nice… to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
I'm done here...for now..."And So It Goes."
