Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.

“So be it! So be it!” I cry in this manicured wilderness. “Who gives a damn!” Excuse this outburst.

He welcomed all proofs that the planet he had known and loved during his boyhood had disappeared entirely.

They thought that artists lived in poverty, and that they had to die before their works were appreciated. They were generally right about that, of course.

I don’t think they’ve heard of anything that wasn’t on TV less than a week ago.

the young people of today seemed to be trying to get through life with as little information as possible.

“The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us,” he went on. “The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly.”

“A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her.

“Everything about life is a joke,” I said. “Don’t you know that?”