Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

We have hugged each other maybe three or four times—on birthdays, very likely, and clumsily. We have never hugged in moments of grief.

“My name is Alex Vonnegut. I’m an alcoholic.” Good for him.

Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist

Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald,

And all the information we received about the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.

Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives—which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind. Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.

“In case nobody has told you,” she said, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else—where everybody learns to make his or her own way.

I was their child with a future. I could read and write.

“Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior,”

“Keep your hat on, Buster. We may wind up miles from here.”

“tri-benzo-Deportamil.”

‘Brother or Sister or Cousin,’ as the case may be, ‘why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?’”

“that is not the general American population out there. And you are not mistaken when you say that they have crawled out from under damp rocks—like centipedes and earwigs and worms. They have never had a friend or a relative. They have had to believe all their lives that they were perhaps sent to the wrong Universe, since no one has ever bid them welcome or given them anything to do.”