Agnostics From The United States

"Those words "We the People" were a way of deceiving people into thinking that there was a national interest. The term national interest is what the novelist Kurt Vonnegut called a granfalloon (this is one of his invented words), which is sort of an artificial constellation of people, people who are artificially brought together but really don't have any common interests."

"I felt like he educated me in... in the genre of optimistic, cynical humanism. [...] He fought in World War II, he saw Dresden. That's what Slaughterhouse-Five was about, it was about his experiences seeing the worst that people could do. And people always took his cynicism as... Or his, I guess I should say, his dryness as cynicism. But it was really idealism. He believed so much in people that he couldn't help but be somewhat disappointed that we were blowing it in the way that we were blowing it? But I would say, line your desk with Kurt Vonnegut and you cannot go wrong."

"Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. "Mark Twain," Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage, "finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died." … His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago "filled with bittersweet lies," a narrator says). The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut's life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. … His experience in Dresden was the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, "so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age." To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness."

"Of all the American writers in my time, Vonnegut is streets ahead of all of them."

"A leftist anti-authoritarian of sorts, he exposed the horrors of totalitarianism as he saw them, including on the left. His political and economic blindspots are hardly a blemish for this libertarian reader, who enjoyed his wonderful and scathing attacks on moral hypocrisy and atrocity. In Slaughterhouse Five, he took on morally nihilistic determinism and the terror bombing of Dresden, where he had been an American POW. In his often-neglected work of brilliance, Mother Night, Vonnegut discussed the moral dilemmas of being an agent who had infiltrated the Nazis and served as a Nazi propagandist — all on behalf of the Allies, but with the effect of bolstering the National Socialist regime. Throughout many of his books and short stories, the latter of which can be read in Welcome to the Monkey House, he examined various forms of modernist dystopianism and displayed a charming quality of shunning the PC orthodoxy when old-fashioned sensibility would better serve. Many readers might most appreciate his short story "Harrison Bergeron," an anti-egalitarian masterpiece that takes place in "2081, and everybody was finally equal." Vonnegut was a great writer with a great sense of humanity."

"When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of "getting to know you" questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That's amazing! And I said, "Oh no, but I'm not any good at ANY of them.""

"Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: ."

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap."

"In the nightmare of a warring world, it takes peculiar skills to get along."

"All right, all right, all right," she said with a sigh, "let's hear the story of life in a blinding flash." "The wreckers against the builders!" said Elmer. "There's the whole story of life!" "And I've got more news for you." "Yes?" piped Ivy. "I am not going to help the wreckers," said Elmer. "My son and I are builders."

"But listen: If anyone here should wind up on a gurney in a lethal-injection facility, maybe the one at Terre Haute, here is what your last words should be: "This will certainly teach me a lesson.""

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to the names of persons who have checked out those titles."

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

"We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer show."

"It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show."

"Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals."

"Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes."

"You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You're not expecting it."

"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.""

"Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be."

"A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap."

"I figured things would be better in Washington, that I'd find a lot of people I admired and belonged with. Washington is worse, Paul—Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. And the women, Paul—the dull wives feeding on the power and glory of their husbands."

"You think I'm insane?" said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him. "You're still in touch. I guess that's the test." "Barely — barely." "A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany." Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and 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." He nodded, "Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first."

"When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn't have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, what Paul missed was what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn."

"It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line."

"Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a credible counterfeit of warmth."

"During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war — production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how."

"My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside."

"People hate it when they're tickled because laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little."

"I don't think there would be many jokes, if there weren't constant frustration and fear and so forth. It's a response to bad troubles like crime."

"The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected."

"Well, I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president."

"No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC. Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress."

"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."

"[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore."

"I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap."

"I have wanted to give Iraq a lesson in democracy — because we're experienced with it, you know. And, in democracy, after a hundred years, you have to let your slaves go. And, after a hundred and fifty years, you have to let your women vote. And, at the beginning of democracy, is that quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite okay. And that's what's going on now."

"We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should."

"[Variation of the same quote:] When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high."

"During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in -- and which we lost -- every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high."

"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.""

"One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war. It's been possible for politicians and movie-makers to encourage us we're always good guys. The Second World War absolutely had to be fought. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. But we never talk about the people we kill. This is never spoken of."

"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."

"You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again, and your father is always in your head when that stuff happens. Writing, most of the time, for most people, is an accident and your father is there for that, too. You know, I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work. Your father won't let it happen."

"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."

"Literature is idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines in only twenty-six symbols, ten arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks."

"1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3. Keep it simple. 4. Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6. Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers."

"I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival."