Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

How is this for a definition of high art: “Making the most of the raw materials of futility”?

The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

“If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.”

Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

“So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies,” he said. “What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars.” “How so?” I said. “All anybody can do with bodies is burn them or bury them,” he said. “There isn’t any nightmare afterwards, when you have to invest them and make them grow.”

I have no reforms to propose. I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Again thanks to Athena, he probably knew more than any other Japanese about the largest industry by far in this country, which was the procurement and distribution of chemicals that, when introduced into the bloodstream in one way or another, gave anybody who could afford them undeserved feelings of purpose and accomplishment.

But he reminded me of several old Master Sergeants I had known in Vietnam. They would say worse things about the Army and the war and the Vietnamese than anybody. But I would go away for a couple of years, and then come back, and they were all still there, crabbing away. They wouldn’t leave until the Vietnamese either killed them or kicked them out of there. How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.

“At least we still have freedom of speech,” I said. And she said, “That isn’t something somebody else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself.”

“I wish I had been born a bird instead,” he said. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.”