Slapstick

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please – a little less love, and a little more common decency.’

‘Slapstick,

I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through it again, and cross out all the ‘Hi ho’s.’ Hi ho.

They were innocent great apes, with limited means for doing mischief, which, in my opinion as an old, old man, is all that human beings were ever meant to be.

Eliza and I believed then what I believe even now: That life can be painless, provided that there is sufficient peacefulness for a dozen or so rituals to be repeated simply endlessly.

‘It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,’ she said. ‘It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, “I love you, too”?’

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

the low comedy of living

Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.

slapstick,

And the remaining pills, when he displayed them to himself in the palm of his huge hand, inevitably looked to him like the remaining grains in the hourglass of his life.